Following on from our recent blog posts, we have been made aware that a number of schools are still experiencing issues with QBSA response times and Portal drop-outs. Instructors may have also noticed that the Pre-Test button in the QBSA has been disabled.

As mentioned before, our IT Team has been monitoring activity since we were informed of the supposed fix to response times, and we are putting forward the following recommendations for schools to consider if they are continuing to experience issues:

• Please note that there is absolutely no pressure or expectation from SiMERR to do your 2023 post-testing by the end of this calendar year. Post-testing should only ever be done when a student has finished their QuickSmart program (usually between 75 and 90 lessons).

• If students were pre-tested in QBSA, we now recommend that they can be post-tested in OZCAAS (which is downloadable from the Private Area of the Portal). There are detailed instructions there on how to install OZCAAS.

• We know that many new instructors are not familiar with OZCAAS, so a free information Zoom PD session for both Numeracy and Literacy will take place on the morning of Thursday 30th of November and will be open to all instructors to attend. Details will be posted on our blog on Wednesday 29th. Additional step-by-step instructions for using OZCAAS will also be added to the User Guides section of the Portal.

• If you pre-tested your 2023 students with OZCAAS, please only post-test them using OZCAAS. Result data can be manually entered with the “Upload Data” button in the Post-Test column of the Portal Class.

• As noted above, the Pre-Test button in QBSA has been temporarily disabled for the remainder of Term 4 due to unreliability. A new version of QBSA (2.0) is being developed for release in early 2024 which uses a different method for recognising and recording response times and does not rely on any server connection when a lesson is running. Pre-Testing will be reactivated when this new version goes live so please hold off any pre-test planning until Term 1 2024, unless you are using OZCAAS for this purpose.

• Please note that the connection drop-out issue is still being investigated by the University’s IT Department and will hopefully be resolved soon.

Once again, your patience and understanding through this challenging time is very appreciated. We are acutely aware of the stress and inconvenience being caused by this and are very open to hearing any response or comments regarding these issues. Anonymous feedback can be submitted through our feedback form here: https://simerr.une.edu.au/quicksmart/feedback/