When Two Platforms Meet:
Lessons from Connecting SkillBlox and ASAP

At the 2026 Coalition on Adult Basic Education (COABE) conference, two federally funded research teams shared findings from a collaboration that brought their work together in a new way. Teaching Skills That Matter (TSTM)-SkillBlox, led by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and World Education/JSI, and the Adult Skills Assessment Program (ASAP), based at the Center for Educational Assessment at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, are both part of the CREATE Adult Skills Network, funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). SkillBlox gives instructors a free platform to find, build, and share open educational resources (OER) organized around skills that matter for adult learners and workers. ASAP is developing state-of-the-art digital assessments aligned to College and Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education (CCRSAE). The COABE session was an opportunity to report back to the field on what happened when the two platforms were connected: what worked, what got in the way, and what comes next.

The collaboration grew out of ongoing discussions at CREATE Network meetings, where the two teams began to notice an obvious fit: each project had exactly what the other was missing. SkillBlox had rich instructional content, but lacked structured assessments. ASAP had rigorous assessments, but lacked direct links to aligned CCRSAE-aligned instructional resources for reading. With a supplemental grant, the teams set out to explore a proof of concept. Their vision was to add new features that created a connected experience where learners could move from instruction in SkillBlox to aligned assessments in ASAP, and then back to more targeted instruction based on their results.

What Was Built

The work unfolded over six months in 2025 and involved content development, technology development, and classroom field testing.

On the content side, teachers participated in an EdTech Maker Space, which combines  service learning with professional development. Educators build OER while deepening their own subject expertise, in this case, strategies for evidence-based reading skill instruction while learning how to use edtech tools to design OER to support instruction. Participants selected a reading from Reading Skills for Today’s Adults. Using that passage, they then created a facilitation guide to support skill instruction for one of four pre-selected target reading skills, ” along with multiple options for modeling and practicing the skill using Google Slides, Padlet, and Wordwall. 

These teacher created activities were then added to a lesson “Blox.”The ASAP team then developed corresponding assessment tasks for each of the four target reading skills, ensuring that the instructional content and the assessment items were measuring the same skills. A number of MakerSpace educators participated in a co-design process to develop these tasks. 

Together, these pieces were designed to support a complete instructional cycle. A teacher would facilitate reading skill lessons using one or more Blox in SkillBlox; once learners were ready to be assessed for that skill, the instructor would “unhide” a link to a corresponding ASAP assessment. After completing the assessment, the learner would see a score report organized by CCRSAE standard, with links back into SkillBlox pointing to Blox aligned to any standards where the learner needed more practice. Instruction leads to assessment, assessment informs the next round of instruction. This was the vision for the learner journey across the two platforms. 

What Worked

Teachers were given a brief, 45-minute training on how to pilot the complete set of instructional and assessment materials (link is for the since-updated public guide). Teachers found the instructional materials genuinely useful. The content was rated as high-quality, relevant, well-aligned to standards, and flexible. Educators appreciated that materials were openly licensed and adaptable; many modified the Google Forms comprehension quizzes, embedded readings into their own slides, and tailored activities to their specific learner populations.

Assessment data from ASAP showed consistent learner growth. Students who completed instruction in SkillBlox and then took corresponding ASAP assessments demonstrated improvement across repeated assessments on the same standards. The alignment between instruction and assessment, something teachers noted felt natural and familiar, appeared to reinforce learning. One teacher noted that the assessment questions felt similar to the comprehension activities already happening in class, which meant students were practicing the same kind of thinking in both places.

Co-designing the ASAP assessments with input from educators also paid off. Learners reported connecting with the assessment content, recognizing real-life and workplace contexts in the reading passages.

What Got In the Way

Two challenges worked in combination to prevent the intended learner journey from taking hold at scale: login friction and limited teacher visibility into student progress. Together, they contributed to learners not completing the learning journey in the way we had intended. 

Logging In Was a Real Barrier

Managing separate accounts for SkillBlox and ASAP, each with its own username and password requirements, proved to be a significant friction point for both teachers and learners. One teacher described trying to simplify things by having students reuse their college login credentials, only to discover that the password requirements didn't match. Another put it plainly: "Our students already have a lot of passwords and usernames they have to keep track of. Some are very tech-savvy and others are not at all."

In remote settings, the problem was compounded. Troubleshooting login issues over Zoom with a classroom full of learners at varying levels of digital confidence was simply not a good use of limited instructional time. Teachers who might have managed to set up learners in a computer lab found it was a much harder challenge in an online class.

Without Progress Monitoring, Login Wasn't Worth It

The login challenge alone might have been manageable if there had been a clear payoff on the other side, but it was hard for teachers to assess that. Both platforms offered some reporting on learner activity and performance, but in practice, that data were visible only to the learner. For instructors to see how students were doing, students had to either share access to their SkillBlox dashboard or manually report their ASAP scores. In a context where self-reporting is unreliable and instructor time is scarce, that process broke down.

Teachers also discovered that learners could access SkillBlox content without logging in at all. Once that became apparent, the calculus shifted: if students could get to the materials anyway, and teachers couldn't see what they were doing regardless, requiring account creation stopped making sense. As one teacher reflected: "When I figured out they could access everything without an account, and I couldn't tell if they were doing it or not anyway — it didn't matter."

The Workaround Explains the Problem

Teachers didn't give up on assessment; they found a path that actually worked for them. One teacher used the ASAP assessments as group activities projected on her screen. Another shifted to using the Google Forms comprehension quiz embedded in each Blox as a way to monitor progress. It wasn't the standards-aligned ASAP assessment the project had intended, but it gave instructors something they could use immediately: a clear picture of which questions students got right and wrong, visible to the teacher without any self-reporting required. 

One teacher was direct about what would have changed things: when asked whether a similarly accessible reporting interface in ASAP might have made it a more attractive option, the answer was, "For me, it would, yeah."

That's not a criticism of ASAP's assessment quality; rather, it's a signal about what instructors need to regularly integrate any assessment tool into their practice. Visibility into student performance isn't a feature request; it's the prerequisite for sustained use.

What this Means for the Field

The collaboration generated clues about both the promise and the prerequisites of integrated EdTech platforms in adult education.

The promise is clear. When instruction and assessment are aligned, co-designed with educators, and built around authentic content, learners engage and improve. The concept of a connected SkillBlox-ASAP experience is sound.

The prerequisites are equally clear. Single sign-on—or some equivalent reduction in login friction—is essential. 

Additionally, easy instructor access to student performance data is not a reporting feature; it is a mechanism by which teachers decide whether a tool is worth their students' time. Both platforms gleaned concrete feedback about where to focus next in further feature updates.

In the meantime, both SkillBlox and ASAP remain freely available, and the CCRSAE-aligned reading content developed through this project has expanded what SkillBlox offers for reading and language instruction. Teachers looking for ready-to-use, standards-aligned OER for adult learners to support CCRSAE Reading and Language have more to work with today than they did a year ago.