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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As we approach the Semester 2 (24/25) question set deadline on 7th March 2025, the Digital Exams Team are sharing another post about question set functionality in Inspera.
You may also wish to check out our first blog post from Semester 1: Question Set Functionality in Inspera Digital Exams – Part 1. This first post covers a lot of the functionality around making your questions and enabling functions such as randomisation, random pulling and candidate selected questions. In this new post, we will cover some of the other functionalities available. These include:
How to share question sets with colleagues,
Accessing and printing PDF copies of the question set,
Duplicating your question set.
Sharing question sets with colleagues
There are a couple of ways you can share your question set content with other colleagues or your external examiners.
For other colleagues on your module team, you may find it useful to add them as a ‘contributor’ to your question set. This will allow them to view questions and preview them in Inspera. This is also particularly useful if you are creating the content together with another colleague.
How to add contributors to your question set:
Open Inspera (this can be done by clicking on your previous exam within Canvas assignment area)
Click on the Author tab
In the search bar type the question set name/module name
Find the question set you wish to print and click on the name to open this
Select the person icon icon (on the left hand side of the icons in the top right corner)
Search the person’s name and select them as a user from the drop down menu that appears
If you would like them to receive an email about this, please keep the ‘notify via e-mail’ box ticket
Click ‘Share’.
Please note: if you cannot find a user when searching for their name, it is likely that they have not accessed Inspera via Canvas yet, and therefore do not have an Inspera account. They would need to access Inspera via Canvas to activate this, and for their name to show in the list. There is guidance available on the self enrol Inspera guidance course on Canvas.
For external examiners, it is possible for you to add them as a contributor as well and ask them to access Inspera via Canvas. You may also wish to consider the option of downloading a PDF copy of the question set content from Inspera in order to share the question set content with them.
Accessing and printing question sets as PDFs
Within your question set in Inspera, it is possible to access and print your question set as a PDF. This could be to share a copy with External Examiners, or to create a paper copy if you are hosting a mock exam where you want a back up paper copy available just incase.
How to print your question set:
Open Inspera (this can be done by clicking on your previous exam within Canvas assignment area)
Click on the Author tab
In the search bar type the question set name/module name
Find the question set you wish to print and click on the name to open this
Select the print icon in the top right corner
On the right hand side click ‘download question set’
The download may take a minute or two to prepare, once ready select download now
The download will be in your downloads folder
Should you wish to change what is available on your PDF, you can use edit Settings. Once within the Print screen, drop down the settings bar.
Settings allow you to:
remove maximum marks
remove ‘documents’ or instruction pages
remove certain questions from the PDF (i.e. hide auto marked questions)
How to edit the PDF of your question set
You can edit your PDF using ABBY Finereader. You can familiarise yourself with the FineReader video guides, and detailed written user guides which have been shared by NUIT.
How to duplicate your question set
Once you have created a question set, you can re-use it. The Digital Exams Team recommend duplicating your Question Set and then editing, this means there’s a clear audit trail of the Question Set used in prior years.
How to duplicate your question set:
Open Inspera (this can be done by clicking on your previous exam within Canvas assignment area)
Click on the Author tab
In the search bar, type the Question Set name/module name (in this example a ‘demo’ Question Set is being searched for)
Find the question set you wish to duplicate and click into the tick box (on the left hand side)
An options bar appears along the bottom, click ‘duplicate’
A message will appear about the duplication, click ‘continue’
Click into this new ‘copy of’ question set
You can re-label the name of the question in the top left corner using the pencil icon.
You can now make any changes to the Question set for an upcoming exam.
Question set deadlines
Once the Module Leader has completed their Digital Exam Form to confirm the details about their Inspera Digital Exam, the next step is to start creating their question sets.
Question sets are created by the module team and shared with the Digital Exams Team via email to Digital.Exams@newcastle.ac.uk.
The question set deadlines for 2024/25 are detailed in the following table:
Semester
Question Set Deadline
Semester 1
15th November
Semester 2
7th March
Semester 1 August Resit (Semester 3)
17th April
Semester 2 August Resit (Semester 3)
8th July
A table with the question set deadlines for each semester.
Training webinars
The Digital Exams Team deliver a training webinar ‘Creating and managing exam questions in Inspera’ which colleagues can sign up to via the Elements training system. The training session covers an on-screen demo of setting up and adding questions to your question set.
It is now possible to upload your students to grading committees via the csv upload option. This blog post works through the steps required to set up grading committees via CSV upload.
Over the last couple of months, Inspera have been making some updates to their Grade workspace. Graders may have noticed some name changes in the appearance or naming in the Grade area. Ahead of our Semester 1 assessment period, the Digital Exams Team wanted to share some information about the changes you will see.
To complete marking within Inspera, graders will use the different workspaces in the Grader workflow:
A question set is a group of questions created in Inspera. In Inspera you can make individual questions, or you can set up a question set and create a group of questions in there. Individual questions can also be imported into your question set.
Creating your question set
Accessing Inspera
All colleagues (and students) access Inspera via Canvas. Colleagues can either access a ‘test’ exam set up in their Canvas Sandbox area, or by going through an existing Inspera exam.
Naming your question set
You should give question sets meaningful names, e.g. ‘MOD1234 Semester 1 Exam 202425’. This makes it easier to identify the question set for the current academic year. Question sets are created in the Author tab of Inspera.
Remember to rename your individual questions too, so that you can easily find them in the question set. Each new question is automatically given the name ‘New Question’ so if you are creating question sets with multiple questions in, giving them a meaningful name will help you find specific ones later.
If you need to update a question, a meaningful name will make it easier and quicker to locate.
Adding labels to your questions
Adding labels to your individual questions can also help with locating and re-using your questions in other question sets.
If you’d like to know about adding labels and using filters to find questions, please see our dedicated label filtering blog post.
Content creation in question sets
There are various features you can use within Inspera to enhance your question sets. These are optional features you can apply within your question set.
For example, you can randomise the order in which the questions appear for students when they sit they exam. You can also use the random pulling feature to pull a sub-set of questions from a larger bank of questions, so that each student receives a different combination of questions.
If you are using both manually marked essay questions, and a set of multiple choice questions, you are able to put these into what is known as sections. This means you could apply randomisation to the multiple-choice questions only. You could also use another feature on the essay questions known as candidate selected questions.
There is a dedicated Content Creation Featureswebsite on our Learning and Teaching Inspera site which lists the full details on these different features.
Question set deadlines
Once the Module Leader has completed their Digital Exam Form to confirm the details about their Inspera Digital Exam, the next step is to start creating their question sets.
Question sets are created by the module team and shared with the Digital Exams Team via email to Digital.Exams@newcastle.ac.uk.
The question set deadlines for 2024/25 are detailed in the following table:
Semester
Question Set Deadline
Semester 1
15th November
Semester 2
7th March
Semester 1 August Resit (Semester 3)
17th April
Semester 2 August Resit (Semester 3)
8th July
A table with the question set deadlines for each semester.
Training webinars
The Digital Exams Team deliver a training webinar ‘Creating and managing exam questions in Inspera’ which colleagues can sign up to via the Elements training system. The training session covers an on-screen demos of setting up and adding questions to your question set.
