Brook Portfolio Company Certica Acquires ItemLogic

Certica Solutions (Certica), provider of the Certica Connect™ edtech platform-as-a-service (PaaS), today announced that it has acquired the ItemLogic™ business from KobellSystems, Inc., the education industry’s leading solution to manage the entire assessment item lifecycle. ItemLogic’s range of item authoring, item banking, workflow, publishing, rendering and scoring features are used by leading assessment publishers and assessment application providers. With this acquisition, Certica will provide ItemLogic’s capabilities in its Certica Connect platform, extending Certica’s portfolio of interrelated, education-centric functionality offered to publishers and edtech vendors.

ItemLogic is an enterprise-class assessment and item content management system which enables users to create more than 30 technology-enhanced question types as well as any number of tests constructed from items of these types. Item and test authors can collaborate easily, with a streamlined workflow and approval process based on familiar social networking paradigms, such as commenting and tagging. ItemLogic supports publishing, curation, management and long-term storage of rich formative and summative assessment content and related metadata. ItemLogic is used by leading assessment content providers, including CenterPoint (formerly Parcc, Inc.) and Key Data Systems.

ItemLogic also features a set of test administration and rendering components that can be embedded into learning management systems (LMS) and assessment applications. Application vendors which deploy the ItemLogic capabilities are collectively delivering assessments to students in more than 200 school districts; vendors which use ItemLogic to render content include Alloy Learning, Assessment Technology, Inc. (ATI), EdGems, EduPoint, Five-Star Technology Solutions, StrongMind, and others.

ItemLogic will be included as a core offering in Test Connect™, a technology service within the Certica Connect platform focused on item and test creation, search, assessment content management, administration, rendering and scoring. The Certica Connect platform provides K-12 vendors with a “one-stop-shop” of interrelated, embeddable technology services, education-centric APIs, and hosted applications which allow edtech companies and content providers to extend and enhance their products. Utilizing Certica Connect’s technology services, business partners can search, discover, align and enrich content; build and deliver assessments and assessment content; integrate data from their clients’ K-12 information systems; and achieve application interoperability.

In the past 18 months, Certica has incorporated a number of best-of-breed technology assets into the Certica Connect platform, including the Academic Benchmarks™ repository of learning standards and taxonomies, and data integration capabilities based on the Ed-Fi® education open data standard.

“We’re excited to be joining the Certica organization,” said Kevin Campbell, founder and president of KobellSystems and innovator of ItemLogic, based in Chesapeake, Va. “The role of ItemLogic as core, underlying infrastructure to support large-scale item creation and item bank management is right in line with Certica’s strategy of providing interrelated technology components and education metadata to its network of publishers and edtech vendor partners. Our companies both offer ways for education sector providers to manage and leverage content, and build products more efficiently and cost-effectively.”

Said Mark Rankovic, Certica’s president and chief executive officer, “we are thrilled that ItemLogic will be joining the Certica team. ItemLogic has a strong track-record of supporting leading assessment content providers and the positive feedback from users is unparalleled. We’re excited to be extending the reach of ItemLogic to Certica’s business partners and providing combined value-added offerings to the market.”

About Certica Solutions
Certica is the innovator of the Certica Connect™ platform-as-a-service which provides application interoperability and centralized integration, access and enrichment of education data, metadata and content. The company partners with a diverse network of K-12 application and system vendors, as well as learning content and assessment providers. Certica also delivers solutions directly to more than 600 school districts and numerous charter school organizations, state education agencies and educational service agencies. Certica is based in Wakefield, Mass.; with offices in Harvard, Mass.; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Austin, Texas.