Category: Inspera

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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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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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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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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 External Case Study and Introduction of Newcastle Inspera Users Teams Community

In this post we will share the external case study that colleagues from the Digital Exams Team wrote for Inspera, and share details of the new Microsoft Teams Community for Inspera users at Newcastle. 

Inspera Case Study 

The Inspera Co-Leads worked with Inspera to write and design a case study about Newcastle University’s work with Inspera Digital Exams. You can read the case study entitled ‘Newcastle University: Fostering Creativity and Innovation with Digital Assessment’ on the Inspera website. Colleagues in our Digital Exams Team here at Newcastle are delighted to have worked with Inspera to write this. We have a fantastic relationship with our Account Manager at Inspera, Fiona Orel, who supports us with our Inspera needs. 

Image of the Inspera case study on Inspera’s website

Newcastle University’s Inspera Digital Exams Team have created an External User Groups with other Inspera users across Higher Education in the UK. The Group currently has members across 14 institutions and meets online every few months. 

Digital Exams using Inspera Assessment @ Newcastle – Teams Community 

We are pleased to share that we have created an internal user space in the form of a Microsoft Teams Community for Inspera users at Newcastle. 

This Teams community is a place for colleagues to share ideas about how Inspera can be used, and maybe even find inspiration.

It also will allow you to keep up to date with the latest developments in the software and flag any general problems, that peers might be able to assist with. Though if you do have any immediate/specific queries about an active exam we would recommend contacting digital.exams@newcastle.ac.uk.

You can request to join the community where you will have access to various materials to support you as an Inspera user. 

The Inspera Assessment Teams Community. 
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Save the Date: Digital Education Technologies Showcase Day 

The Learning Enhancement and Technology Team in the Learning and Teaching Development Service (LTDS) are hosting a Digital Education Technologies Showcase Day on Monday 1st September 2025 between 12 and 3pm in the Boilerhouse.

This is a fantastic opportunity to meet the teams and people behind our Digital Education Technologies here at Newcastle. This will include: Canvas, ReCap, Vevox, Inspera (Digital Exams), Assignments (Canvas, Turnitin and New Canvas Quiz), Buddycheck, NULA, NU Reflect, AI, H5P, as well as the Numbas Team, Digital Adoption (M365 and Adobe) and Library Reading Lists Team.

This event is aimed at both academic and professional services colleagues already using these systems who want to take that step further, as well as new colleagues who want to learn about the digital technologies available.

The event will take place as a drop in, so you don’t need to sign up. If you would like to make any suggestions around what you would like to see at the event, please complete our Microsoft Form.

More information will be shared about this event over the summer.

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Psychometric Dashboard Access for Inspera Digital Exams Team

What is the Psychometric Dashboard?

Inspera have been working on the release of a psychometric dashboard for data on Inspera exams. The dashboard is built using AWS QuickSight and provides insights into assessments conducted on the Inspera platform. The QuickSight Dashboard is part of Inspera’s phase 1 in their strategy for introducing Test-Level Analysis. You can find out more about the Psychometric Dashboard on Inspera’s website. 

What can Inspera users access at the moment? 

Phase 1 allows the Digital Exams Team to have access to an administrative dashboard, but by Phase 3 Inspera hopes to have this integrated into the Inspera platform, where colleagues currently create questions and grade exams. There is not currently an estimated date for this to be available, but we will be keeping up to date with all developments. 

If colleagues are interested in accessing data, the Digital Exams Team can provide a PDF download from Inspera exam’s scheduled from 1st December 2024 onwards that have been graded and marks confirmed. Note: there are some limitations in how much can currently be shared in the PDF but a fuller view is expected later in 2025.  

What data is available? 

Information around the sort of data available is noted within this section and has been extracted from the Psychometric Dashboard page on Inspera’s website. Within this blog post, you can find out about all the different type of data available. Some screenshots are included but check out the Psychometric Dashboard page on Inspera’s website for further graphics. 

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Authentic Assessment Case Study: Using Inspera for a Language Module Assessment Strategy

Loiana Leal, Lecturer in Modern Languages, in the School of Modern Languages has recently developed a case study around their use of Inspera for digital assessment via digital examinations in a language module for formative and summative assessments. 

Head over to the Case Study database to read all about Loiana’s work of using Inspera in their POR2010 – Level B Portuguese HE Intermediate module.