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How Basispoort makes digital learning resources accessible to 1.5 million pupils
The digital link between schools, pupils, publishers and educational organisations
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How do you ensure that 1.5 million pupils and 125,000 teachers have simple, secure and reliable access to digital learning resources every day, without schools having to deal with dozens of separate systems and login procedures? Basispoort solves that problem. For more than ten years, we have worked together on the platform that helps keep almost the entire Dutch primary education sector running.
One secure login for 1.5 million pupils and 125,000 teachers at 7,000 primary schools via Single Sign-On (SSO)
Lower administrative burden and improved ease of use
The digital link between schools, publishers and educational organisations
Secure data exchange in line with national standards (EDU-V)
An invisible but crucial think
Most pupils and teachers don’t realise it, but behind virtually every digital teaching programme in primary education lies a network of systems, standards and partnerships. A new pupil entered into a school administration system will, by the next day, have access via a uniform login to all the required teaching methods from more than 30 affiliated publishers and assessment providers. In addition, the user is linked directly to the school network.
Precisely because Basispoort occupies this central position, reliability, security and scalability are crucial. A change does not affect just one organisation, but an entire chain of parties that depend on the platform every day.
Challenge
Preventing fragmentation in the digital education landscape and developing a future-proof platform through which pupils and teachers can easily access digital learning resources, while enabling schools, publishers and chain partners to work together securely and in a standardised way.
Solution
A scalable platform through which pupils and teachers can access digital learning resources from different providers via a single secure login, while at the same time connecting schools, publishers and chain partners through standardised data exchange.
About Stichting Basispoort
Stichting Basispoort is a pre-competitive partnership between four major educational publishers and three school suppliers. As a not-for-profit foundation, Basispoort has one aim: to make access to digital learning resources in primary education as simple as possible. Since 2013, all primary schools in the Netherlands have used the free Basispoort service every day. With a single login, more than 125,000 teachers and 1.5 million pupils have access to their digital learning resources anytime and anywhere: at school, at home or wherever they may be.
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A joint solution to a growing problem
Fifteen years ago, when chalkboards were replaced by digital whiteboards, a new problem arose. Publishers developed their own digital learning environments, each with their own accounts, login procedures and links. This led to a risk of fragmentation and a rapid increase in the administrative burden on schools.
To prevent that, educational publishers and suppliers jointly took the initiative in 2010 to create a uniform access service for primary education. The starting point was clear: digital technology should support education, not make it more complicated. That is how Stichting Basispoort came into being: a public-private partnership in which schools, publishers and suppliers work together on a secure, simple and future-proof digital infrastructure for Dutch primary education.
For the development of the platform, Basispoort launched a tender, and we were selected as its partner: not only because of our technical expertise, but also because we were able to think along about the broader challenges within the education chain. And that proved essential. Every technical choice affects the entire chain of parties that rely on the platform every day. From the outset, we have therefore fulfilled a dual role: as development partner and strategic adviser.
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From a single login to a nationwide platform
Together, we developed a Single Sign-On platform through which pupils, teachers and educational support staff can access almost all the digital learning resources used by their school via a single login. This removed the need for schools to manage separate accounts, passwords and integrations for each individual teaching method.
From the outset, ease of use was a key focus during the development process, particularly for young pupils. That is why Basispoort supports a range of user-friendly login methods that are tailored to the practical realities of primary education.
Behind that simple user experience lies a complex ecosystem of schools, publishers, software suppliers and educational organisations that exchange data securely and in a standardised way.
“Since the very first phase, Stichting Basispoort and iO have had a highly constructive and informal collaboration. iO provides practical and workable solutions for a range of issues in both platform and infrastructure.”
Ellen ter Horst, Directeur at de Rolf Groep
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Continuous development in a changing education chain
In recent years, we have modernised the platform step by step. We migrated the infrastructure to Microsoft Azure and now manage the entire environment through Infrastructure as Code. This enables Basispoort to scale the platform’s capacity predictably in the run-up to busy periods in the school year, such as assessment periods when digital learning resources are used intensively. At the same time, management, changes and new releases remain controlled and reliable.
We also modernised the authentication and authorisation layer by increasingly making use of proven standards such as OAuth and OpenID Connect. As a result, the platform remains easier to maintain and Basispoort can respond more quickly to new security and compliance requirements.
In the further development of the platform, we are also paying increasing attention to digital accessibility. In the latest version of Basispoort, we explicitly take accessibility requirements into account, so that users with visual impairments or other support needs can use the platform independently as well. In doing so, Basispoort aligns with the broader ambition of making digital educational services accessible to every user.
In addition, we are developing the platform towards an event-driven architecture. This makes it possible to process changes in pupil data, licences and integrations more reliably and efficiently between all parties involved, without systems being directly dependent on one another.
In this way, Basispoort continues to grow in line with the changing demands of education.
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Ready for the next phase of digital education
As education has become increasingly digital, the role of Basispoort has grown ever more prominent. What began as an access facility for a handful of publishers has grown into the hub of the digital learning materials chain in primary education. In that context, secure and standardised data exchange is playing an increasingly important role.
Within education, schools, suppliers and sector organisations are working together on EDU-V: the national framework of agreements for secure, reliable and future-proof data exchange. Basispoort plays an active role in this. The fact that the platform now holds the EDU-V quality mark confirms that innovation, security and interoperability come together here, and that Basispoort will remain a reliable digital foundational service for Dutch education in the future.
A platform education can rely on
A platform that supports almost the entire Dutch primary education sector must continue to function reliably even under peak load. That is why we continuously invest together in scalability, security and availability. Thanks to a cloud-native infrastructure, Infrastructure as Code, and an architecture designed for reliability and growth, Basispoort continues to perform stably even during busy periods in the school year. On busy school mornings, the platform processes more than 2.2 million requests per hour, while performance and availability remain at the level schools and pupils expect.
Results in figures
- 1.5million+ pupils use the platform
- 125.000teachers gain daily access to digital learning resources
- 99.98%measured availability
- 43.6 msaverage response time
- 2.2million requests per hour during peak periods
- 63 million+processed requests per week
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A partnership of more than 10 years
What began as platform development grew into a long-term strategic partnership. Over more than ten years, our role gradually expanded: from technical delivery to contributing ideas on architecture, cloud, security, standardisation and innovation within the education chain. We see the collaboration as a long-term relationship in which we are building something together that truly matters.
“This is a collaboration in which technology and social impact come together. We do not just build software; we support a platform that plays a crucial role every day for millions of pupils and teachers in the Netherlands.”
Kevin Wareman, Solution Architect