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.
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.
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.
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’.
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:
Image from Instructure Canvas Community Website
If you have any questions regarding this change, please contact ltds@newcastle.ac.uk.
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.
Metric help pop-over
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.
Student attendance grid view
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.
Tiers
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.
Student Engagement history
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.
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.
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 tipsin 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.
