Inspera have developed a new digital drawing tool which has increased functionality beyond the existing drawing tool. In terms of what is new, the new tool allows you to enable the drawing tool at a question level, rather than at a test level. Colleagues can choose what questions they wish to enable the drawing tool on for their students to use in their Inspera digital exam.
The new Digital Drawing Tool is now available to use on Inspera as of Friday 27th February 2026.
Within this blog post you can find out how you can enable the new drawing tool on your Inspera exam questions in your question sets and the functionality available within the tool.
Within Inspera, the standard exam set up is a secure locked-down exam environment where students are only able to access their Inspera Digital exam. They are unable to access internet search engines, their own notes or other applications.
Web pages and PDF documents can be ‘allow listed‘ so that they can be accessed securely within an Inspera Digital Exam. Allow listing of web pages or documents is completed while creating your Question Set.
The resources (when allow listed) are made available for students in locked down Inspera Digital Exams. A network filter ensures students are not able to navigate away from the page specified. All links, except allow listed resources, are blocked.
This blog post has been created to share some best practice around allow listing use in order to ensure the best experience for our students.
We’re currently within the Semester 1 Exam period for 2025-26. For anyone marking using Inspera we’ve collated some handy tips which you may find helpful.
Hints and Tips
To access your exam(s) to mark, click the link within the assignment point in Canvas. You must be a teacher or teaching assistant on the Canvas module.
If you need to search for a specific student, within the Inspera ‘Grading Overview’ section, use the search bar – you can search for a student ID.
To download raw marks from Inspera, as an Excel file. Click the ‘Options’ button at the top right of the Grade screen and navigate to ‘Downloads’. Select ‘Marks and Explanations as Excel file’.
Inspera Exams are always set up initially within the Canvas assignment as out of 100 points. You can edit the points on the Canvas assignment after the exam if needing to display raw marks (edit the Canvas assignment)
For manually marked questions, Markers can add Annotations to student submissions.
Within the student’s submitted text, click the left mouse button to select the text you want to annotate. Click Annotate.
Once marking is complete within Inspera, don’t forget to Confirm Marks, this will complete the grading step and push the completed marks from inspera to Canvas Gradebook.
It is now possible to port Inspera digital exam grades from Canvas Gradebook into NESS. For instructions on how to do this please see NESS Guidance.
Video demonstrations: There are a range of marking videos available which provide on-screen demonstrations of grading tasks. See Video guides for Markers.
The January Exam period (for 2026) is taking place from Tuesday 6 January 2026 to Tuesday 20 January 2026 (including Saturday 10 January and Saturday 17 January). Inspera Digital Exams will be running throughout this. This blog aims to share communications Module Teams are asked to share with their students ahead of their Inspera exams, along with information around support with marking once your Inspera digital exam is over.
Communications for Students
Module Teams are encouraged to share communications with their students if sitting an Inspera digital exam. Note: Students must know their own University log in details (username and password). It may not be possible to reset forgotten log ins on the day of the exam. Please remind students of this. Below is some draft text that you can use in an email and/or Canvas announcement.
[Title] Preparing for your [MODCODE] digital exam: make sure you know your log in details
To sit your upcoming Inspera digital exam you will need to know your University login details (username and password).
Please check that you know your login details before the day of the exam and that you can successfully sign into a campus Cluster PC. If you do not know your login details on the day of the exam it may not be possible to reset them before the exam starts.
Your username begins with a letter (usually c) followed by the middle 7 numbers from your student number, which you can find on your smartcard. E.g. if your smartcard shows your student number is 212345678, your username is c1234567.
To help you prepare for your assessment, you can try out our demo exams via Canvas. There is a locked down demo and an open book demo. Both demo exams reflect the same demo content. The locked down demo allows students to experience the in-person Inspera exam security, therefore this particular demo should only be taken within a Campus PC cluster (as the required software will be installed).
There is also a student page on the Academic Skills Kit about Inspera which students may wish to look at ahead of your exams.
Colleagues in the Inspera Digital Exams Team of the Learning and Teaching Development Service (LTDS) invited colleagues from Inspera Assessment to visit Newcastle University for the third year in a row to host an on campus event with our users.
Fiona Orel and Ishan Kolhatkar visited Newcastle on Wednesday 5th November for this year’s ‘Inspera: Sharing Best Practice’ Event.
Our Inspera users were invited to come along to find out updates about using Inspera at Newcastle and upcoming features on the Inspera roadmap. The event is a great opportunity for colleagues to learn about how they can enhance their use of Inspera and ensure best practice. The Inspera Digital Exams Team arranged for some demonstrations on features and functionality listed in the agenda below.
The agenda included:
Welcome and Introduction – An update from the Inspera Digital Exams Team and update from Inspera Assessment around their Roadmap
Inspera demonstration – Rubrics Functionality, Manually Marked Multiple Attempts Assessments and Feedback Release Features
Questions and Discussion – Colleagues submitted their questions for Inspera to answer.
We’d like to share an important update about how student engagement data is presented in NULA. The metric previously labelled ‘Attendance’ has now been renamed to ‘On campus engagement’.
This change is now live in the system.
Why we’ve made this change
The ‘Attendance’ metric in NULA shows a student’s engagement across all in-person, timetabled sessions available to them in their active modules — including both monitored and non-monitored activities.
Because this metric reflects more than just formal attendance, we felt that ‘On campus engagement’ better captures the full picture of a student’s participation in scheduled learning opportunities.
What this means for staff and students
Students will notice only a label change — from ‘Attendance’ to ‘On campus engagement’. There are no changes to the underlying data or calculations.
We’ve updated this terminology consistently across:
We’ve also expanded our messaging to students to make it clear that the on campus engagement metric is not a formal attendance record and will not impact academic records.
What this looks like
In the student interface:
In the staff interface:
Supporting student understanding
We will be communicating this update through our student channels, but if students come to you with questions, please feel free to use or adapt the message below:
Your ‘on campus engagement’ in NULA shows the opportunities available to you to take part in all timetabled events in your active modules. This gives you a clearer picture of your overall engagement and can help you notice any gaps so you can make informed choices about how you learn.
Please note that ‘on campus engagement’ data in NULA is not your formal attendance record and will not impact your academic record.
The system is designed to give you real-time insights that support your learning and any conversations with your personal tutor or support teams. It is not used in a punitive way.
If something does not look as expected, it may be due to data processing delays or how activities have been recorded.
For more information, please visit the NULA pages on the Academic Skills Kit website.
Vevox have made a series updates to their features in their October product update. Find out more about the new features available and improvements to existing features, including:
Over the summer, work took place to improve the security, functionality, and performance of Turnitin assignments in Canvas. This means there is a slight change of workflow when setting up a new Turnitin assignment.
You are no longer be required to select Turnitin as an “External Tool” from the Submission Type assignment settings. This step occurs on the assignment homepage instead, select Turnitin from the Assignment Settings (3 dots) button when creating a new assignment.
Please note that change will only affect how you create new Turnitin assignments; any pre-existing Turnitin assignments will still be available and any Turnitin assignments already set up for 2025/26 will not need to be changed.
It is now possible to submit a Turnitin assignment on behalf of a student, via the Turnitin inbox. Simply select ‘Submit on behalf of student’, and a drop down menu appears of all students attached to the course in Canvas. Select the student you wish to submit for, confirm your selection by clicking continue, then follow the steps to choose a file and upload the submission.
Inspera’s feedback release aims for transparency for all exam questions, however this had caused limitation for Module Teams wishing to releasing Essay comments as feedback, without revealing correct answers to automated marking. A new workaround is now available.
When marking an Inspera exam which includes Essay feedback comments that you wish to be visible to your individual students, comments must be saved as visible to candidate in Grade i.e.
At the start of Semester 1 and Semester 2, the Inspera Digital Exams Team contact the Module Leader of any centrally supported summative Inspera exams that are due to happen that Semester. We will request that a Digital Exams Form is completed to provide the team with lots of useful information.
You can find out more about the process of using an Inspera Digital Exam from start to finish for Semester 1, Semester 2 and for mid-semester exams, which we refer to as ad-hocs In our Digital Exam Journey PDFs.
