Author: Kimberly

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Inspera: Sharing Best Practice Event 2025

Introduction

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.
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Inspera Digital Exams Update – 2025/26 Academic Year 

Inspera Digital Exams Team 

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. 

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New Canvas Gradebook Feature

View Hidden Grades

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.

How do I use this feature?

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.

The gradebook settings area in Canvas Gradebook where you can enable ‘view hidden grades indicator’.

What does the feature look like in action?

In the Gradebook, an orange indicator displays which grades have not been posted next to each grade where this is applicable.

An orange dot shown against a grade in the Canvas Gradebook to indicate the grade has not been posted.
An orange dot shown against a grade in the Canvas Gradebook to indicate the grade has not been posted.

Find out more

You can find out more about the functionality of the Canvas Gradebook on the Canvas Course Navigation website, under the heading ‘Grades’.

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Digital Education Technologies Showcase Day: Summary

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.

Stalls set up at the Showcase Day event
Stalls set up at the Showcase Day event.
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Digital Accessibility Demo Day – 4th November 2025

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:

  • Screen reader
  • Speech to text
  • Keyboard-only interaction
  • Low vision
  • Low mobility
  • Magnification
  • Canvas Ally

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.

Colleagues at the Digital Accessibility Demo Day held in March 2025.

Time and location

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.

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Preparation for August Assessment Period

The August Assessment Period is taking place from 4th to 15th August 2025, with Inspera Digital Exams running from 7th to 15th August. In this blog post, we are sharing communications that are useful for Module Teams to share with their students ahead of their Inspera exams, along with information around support with marking.

Communications for Students 

Module Teams are encouraged to share the following communications with their students. These communications are also shared via emails with module teams once the exam is set up by our Digital Exams Team:

Preparing for your [module code] Inspera 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. 

If you cannot remember your password, you can reset it online or you can contact the IT Service Desk for help. If you have your password but would like to change it to something that is easier to remember you can change your password online. 

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. 

Marking your Inspera Exams 

Once the Inspera exams have taken place, Module Teams mark the exams under the Grade area of Inspera. You can find various marking hints and tips in a previous blog post about this. You can also view our Marking Exams in Inspera webpage, as well as our Inspera Feedback Release webpage.

Save the Date 

Inspera are hosting an on-campus event with our users on Wednesday 5th November (Time TBC – but will be PM). Further details will be circulated to Module Teams using Inspera. 

Questions? 

If you have any questions, please contact digital.exams@newcastle.ac.uk where a member of our team can assist you.  

You may also wish to join our Inspera Assessment Teams site to stay up to date with updates. 

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Inspera Digital Exams Team Leading External User Group

Inspera External User Group

The Inspera Digital Exams Team at Newcastle have set up and led on a user group for Inspera users at other institutions in the UK. 

Through existing connections and the support of our Account Manager at Inspera, we have contacted colleagues in similar roles to ourselves (Learning Enhancement and Technology Advisers) to create a group where we can share best practice, learn from each other and have the opportunity to discuss aspects of our Inspera use.

The group first met in November 2024 and as of June 2025 has 33 members across 13 institutions. We have received lots of positive feedback on how useful the group is, and we have enjoyed meeting other fellow Inspera users.

The Inspera Leads at Newcastle are always looking for ways to improve the service our Digital Exams Team can offer and work with Inspera to share feature requests. The group have been sharing what their priorities are in terms of things we would like to see in Inspera so that we can share this with Inspera.

Inspera Priorities at Newcastle 

Maddie and Kimberly of the Digital Exams Team, along with some of our academics who use Inspera, took part in some user research with Inspera in relation to marking and feedback. 

In relation to marking and feedback, our key priorities are: 

  1. Release of feedback restrictions, i.e. flexibility to release essay feedback comments without releasing banks of MCQs. 
  1. Editing questions after an exam i.e. where mistakes have been found afterwards upon marking. A request has been highlighted whereby, for auto marked questions, users can use answer key corrections (like the functionality of MCQs) but for all for auto marked questions. 
  1. Data availability for questions used in exams. Inspera are currently working on their analytics, with a psychometric dashboard currently available for the Inspera Digital Exam Leads to access. 

Other feature requests we support, which are in relation to question authoring, include: 

  • Author tab to include example questions and question sets. 
  • ‘Tick box’ to confirm when a question set has been finalised.   
  • Ability to have template of example question sets to share across users.   
  • Being able to collapse sections in assessments to avoid having to scroll up and down when editing one of the later sections. 

If you would like to know more about our priorities at Newcastle, you can get in touch with the Digital Exams Team via: Digital.Exams@newcastle.ac.uk.  

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Vevox Customer Story

Read Vevox’s customer story about why Newcastle University chose Vevox as our go-to student response solution.

Vevox interviewed Vevox Lead, Carol Summerside, of the Learning and Teaching Development Service to find out about our use of Vevox at Newcastle.

You can check out the customer story on the Vevox website.

Vevox Logo
Vevox Logo