Author: Kimberly

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User guide to the Inspera Learning and Teaching webpages

The Inspera Digital Exams Leads continue to build and develop the asynchronous guidance available on our Inspera Learning and Teaching website. There are various pages to support you with your use of Inspera. Within this blog post you can find out how to best use our website and the different sections available. 

New webpages 

Over the last 12 months, there have been a series of new webpages designed to support our users. These include: 

  • Inspera Ad-Hoc Exams – Find out how Inspera can be used for both formative and summative ad-hocs. 
  • Inspera Rubrics – Find out about how you can create and add rubrics to your questions, mark using rubrics and make these available to your students both during the exam and part of feedback. 
  • Inspera Monitor – Find out about what the monitor area is used for and how you can use this for any formative or mock exams that you are running in-house. 
  • External Examiners and Inspera – Find out about how you can support external examiners to access Inspera for both reviewing questions and reviewing grades. 
Coming soon: Using Inspera for formative and mock exams webpage.
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Inspera Customer Story

In this post we will share a recent customer story that Inspera created alongside our Inspera Digital Exam Co-Leads, Maddie and Kimberly.

Customer Story

At the 2026 International e-Assessment Awards in London, Newcastle University was the winner of the Best University Digital Assessment Programme.

The recognition marked a major milestone in a journey that began in the 2021/22 academic year. What started as a rapid response to pandemic-era take-home testing has evolved into a fully invigilated, campus-wide digital exam operation that rivals traditional paper-based testing.

You can read the full customer story on the Inspera website.

Inspera and Newcastle University Logos
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Updates to Vevox PowerPoint Add-In

Vevox have made some useful updates to the PowerPoint Add-In as part of their June 2026 update. You can find out about more of the recent updates made to the Vevox dashboard on the blog post Vevox: June New Features Release. These updates help make things clearer, easier to find and better connected!

There are six key updates which include:

  1. New ‘View slide’ option.
  2. New location of the leaderboard option
  3. New functionality for clearing results from a question slide
  4. Deleting polls function change
  5. PowerPoint slide decks will ‘remember’ which Vevox session they were previously linked with
  6. New functionality around ‘switching sessions’.

Find out more about each of these updates in the rest of this blog post.

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Inspera New Digital Drawing Tool

We are excited to share a new Digital Drawing Tool is available in Inspera, which has increased functionality compared to the existing legacy tool. From 2026-27 academic year, the existing tool will be removed in place of the new drawing tool only.

How is the tool different from the existing tool? 

Previously, our team would enable the existing drawing tool across your entire test (if you selected this on your Digital Exam Form), where it would be available for students to use in any/all essay questions in your question set. 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. 

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Vevox: June New Features Release

Vevox's logo

Vevox have made a series updates to their features in their June product update. 

Find out more about the new features available and improvements to existing features, including: 

  • User interface updates 
  • Word cloud analysis 
  • Leaderboard flexibility  
  • Correct answer update/amendment ability 
  • Word cloud questions answer restriction ability 
  • Rich text editor improvements.
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Vevox Updates May 2026

Within this blog post, the Vevox @ Newcastle Team share details around the success of our Vevox adoption since its launch and details of a new User Interface coming in June 2026. 

Vevox's logo

Vevox Adoption 

Vevox has been our Audience Interaction System (AIS) at Newcastle University for coming up 3 years in August 2026. The Vevox @ Newcastle Team spent some time looking at our usage statistics with our Customer Success Manager and are delighted with its adoption during this time.  

Newcastle University is performing significantly above both the overall sector average and the Large University benchmark across the measured adoption period, consistently outperforming expected adoption levels. This strong early growth demonstrates a highly successful institutional rollout, with Vevox gaining traction quickly across academic staff and becoming embedded into teaching and learning practices faster than is normally seen. 

In the past year we have seen a 20% increase in the number of new Vevox adopters. Vevox users at Newcastle have also indicated a Net Promoter Score of 8 out 10 regarding satisfaction of Vevox usage.  

New User Interface 

There is an update planned for the Vevox User Interface (UI). Within the poll creation area, you will notice a different use of space. You can still see a list of all the content in your session, but there is now more emphasis on previewing what that content looks like. This makes it easier to manage your presentation and stay focused on what your audience will see. 

This update will be rolling out to your dashboard on Sunday 7th June from 6am UTC. For more information, please see the Vevox release information about this. 

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Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2026

Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) takes place on the 3rd Thursday of May each year. Individuals are encouraged to take an hour to experience first-hand the impact of digital accessibility (or lack thereof). This year GAAD takes place today on Thursday 21st May 2026.

Within this blog post, you can find out about asynchronous and synchronous content available to you to help you understand how to ensure your practice is accessible.

This blog content is relevant to colleagues in all roles across our University.

How can I increase my awareness and understanding of digital accessibility?

Asychronous resources

There are plenty of resources you can use to get started and learn about how you can make further considerations around accessibility and encourage others to do the same.

You can check out the following resources available at Newcastle: 

Accessibility in Practice Webinar

As well as engaging with the online asynchronous recordings, you can also sign up to attend our Accessibility in Practice online webinar to learn more about how you can ensure your digital content is accessible in practice. The next session is being delivered on Wednesday 1st July, 15:00-16:30. If you can’t make this session, please select the ‘declare interest‘ button so that you can be notified when a further session is added.

Additional resources

The University’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Team also deliver a Disability and Accessibility session aims to provide colleagues with baseline knowledge and skills to effectively support disabled students and colleagues at Newcastle University.

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Vevox: April New Features Release

Vevox have made a series updates to their features in their April product update.

Find out more about the new features available and improvements to existing features, including:

  • New question type: Matching
  • Introduction of ‘Quick Polls’
  • Customisation of Countdown Timer Sounds
  • Timer Display
  • Improvements to the AI Quiz Generator
  • PowerPoint Slides Embed in Present View
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Inspera Digital Exams – New Digital Drawing Tool Available

Introduction

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.

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Inspera Digital Exams: Allow Listed Resources Best Practice

What is allow listing?

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.

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