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.
Guidance on the new steps to setting up a Turnitin assignment can be found on the Learning and Teaching website.
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.
If you wish to copy an assignment from a previous year, follow the guidance for Using the Turnitin Assignment Copy tool.
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.
If you have any queries, please contact ltds@newcastle.ac.uk
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.
Enabling Essay comment feedback only:
a. Feedback comments for individual student submissions are known on Inspera as ‘annotations’ and/or ‘page notes’. To see more about annotations or page notes go to Marking Exams in Inspera | Learning and Teaching @ Newcastle | Newcastle University and navigate to ‘How to mark manually marked questions using Inspera’.
a. You can do this by clicking Options and then ‘Open test in deliver’:
a. Please ensure you do not tick ‘Enable Candidate Report’
Possible limitations:
Using this method means:
If you have any questions specifically about your feedback use case, please contact digital.exams@ncl.ac.uk .
For general information about all feedback release options please see our dedicated feedback release website.
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.
Continue reading “Inspera Digital Exams Update – 2025/26 Academic Year “In the Gradebook Settings of the Canvas Gradebook area, a View Hidden Grades indicator option is available. This will allow Teachers and Admins to see an icon marking any grades that have not yet been posted to students.
This will help you quickly identify which grades are hidden from students, reducing confusion and ensuring more accurate communication about grade visibility.
This feature is available for use from 25th September 2025.
To use this feature, you would navigate to the Gradebook area of your course in Canvas.
You would then locate the ‘Gradebook Settings’ by selecting the settings option (cog icon) in the top right corner of the screen. Once here, you will navigate to the ‘View Options’ tab where you will be able to select the ‘View hidden grades indicator’. This enables the hidden grades indicator within the Gradebook of the particular course you are in.
In the Gradebook, an orange indicator displays which grades have not been posted next to each grade where this is applicable.
You can find out more about the functionality of the Canvas Gradebook on the Canvas Course Navigation website, under the heading ‘Grades’.
The Learning Enhancement and Technology (LET) Team in the Learning and Teaching Development Service (LTDS) were joined by colleagues from NUMBAS, Library Reading Lists, Digital Adoption, FMS Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) Team and representatives from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) in LTDS.
The LET Team were delighted at the turnout on the day and the fantastic conversations that were able to take place. Find out more about the event and what colleagues thought about the event within this blog post.
Colleagues using Canvas should be aware of a recent change affecting YouTube videos embedded within their courses. Due to updates in YouTube’s monetisation policies, videos embedded directly into Canvas may now display adverts.
This change will take effect on 22nd September 2025.
This is happening as over the recent years, video content has become a staple in learning environments and monetisation of that content has become increasingly important to those creators, many of which are educators themselves. As a result, Google/YouTube has evolved its model and approach to this.
It applies to both newly added and previously embedded videos, and the adverts are controlled entirely by YouTube.
Unfortunately, there is no way to disable these adverts within the standard Canvas environment.
To warn viewers of the potential of adverts being displayed, Canvas has introduced a new content overlay warning. This message appears before a video plays, alerting viewers that the video may contain advertising.
On desktop browsers, the warning is shown prior to playback, while on the Canvas mobile apps, it appears at the top of the page.
An example of this notice can be seen below:
If you have any questions regarding this change, please contact ltds@newcastle.ac.uk.
What does “accessible” mean?
What difficulties do students have accessing the material we provide?
How do students surmount those difficulties?
How do you improve the accessibility of your material?
We’re putting on an event to help answer those questions.
It’s important that all of our digital services are accessible to their users, whether they’re students or colleagues. The Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations set out some legal requirements that we must meet.
But digital accessibility is a complex topic and many colleagues have found it hard to understand what they need to do to ensure their teaching material is accessible.
At our digital accessibility demo day, you can have a go at accessing university teaching material at a selection of stations simulating different access requirements and supports, including:
We’ll have plenty of pointers to guidance and training opportunities to help you improve the accessibility of your material.
People from LTDS, NUIT and the Disability Interest Group will be there to offer support and answer any questions you may have about digital accessibility.
The event will take place on Wednesday 5th March 2025, in the Boiler House. We are hosting a drop in for colleagues from 10:30-12:00 and for students from 12:30-14:00.
The Boiler House is in the middle of campus, between the Armstrong Building and the Student Union. Access is step-free.
There’s no presentation as part of the session – just drop in and talk to one of the facilitators.
As we begin the new academic year, NULA has introduced a range of new features and enhancements in the staff-facing system designed to make learning analytics more accessible, informative, and useful. These updates build on feedback from colleagues and aim to provide clearer insights into student engagement, easier navigation of the system, and more practical tools to support tutoring conversations.
To make NULA’s metrics clearer and easier to interpret, a new metric help pop-over has been introduced. This feature provides quick, accessible explanations of each engagement metric—such as attendance, Canvas activity, submissions, and days since last activity—along with the data sources used to calculate them. By simply clicking on the hotspot icons in the student list or student overview pages, staff can see detailed guidance without leaving the page.
The student attendance grid in the student overview has been upgraded to give staff more flexibility and clearer insights. Instead of a fixed 30-day snapshot, colleagues can now filter attendance by a date range, with a simplified table view, making it easier to spot patterns that matter in student conversations.
The new Tiers feature makes it easier to filter and navigate student data by School, Faculty, or course. Depending on their role within the system, this means staff can quickly focus on the level of detail most relevant to them, whether looking across a whole Faculty or drilling down to a single course. Tiers also pave the way for more granular engagement metrics, giving a clearer picture of how students are engaging.
The student engagement history on a student overview page has been enhanced to give staff greater flexibility when reviewing patterns over time. You can now apply date range filters to focus on specific periods and choose to view individual data sets—including attendance, submissions, or Canvas engagement—separately. This makes it easier to spot trends, identify changes in behaviour, and have more informed conversations with students about their engagement.
These updates improve NULA’s usability and provide staff with clearer, more flexible insights into student engagement. Additional features and enhancements will be introduced throughout the year, continuing to expand the system’s capabilities and support for staff and students.
Multiple Attempts
Module teams, for the new academic year, can allow their students to take practice Inspera exams repeatedly using Multiple Attempts with manually marked questions. Use with automarked content has been available during the latter half of 24-25.
Important note: Multiple Attempts is a feature which supports formative digital exams. There is no option to lock down an exam using Multiple Attempts.
Setting up Multiple Attempts with manually marked questions
Important note: Multiple Attempts as a feature cannot be used with templates. Please ensure when setting up, your template is left blank i.e.
Each attempt will enable a different start/end time which you input:
Click ‘create attempt’ to save and ‘add’ to create another.
5, Under ‘Setting final result’, choose the most appropriate option for your exam which will be applicable as part of your student feedback. Options are:
The Digital Exams team will be releasing this new feature prior to Academic Year 25-26 teaching starts. We’ll also be updating our Multiple Attempts dedicated website.
Any questions please contact digital.exams@ncl.ac.uk
