A new year brings new features and improvements
We’re starting the year with the official launch of our highly anticipated drawing tool, alongside several key enhancements across Inspera Assessment, Integrity Browser, and Inspera Originality.
Inspera Assessment
What’s new?
New Drawing Tool
We are kicking off the year with the launch of our New Drawing Tool. Designed to be usable across varied question types, this simple and intuitive tool provides a method for candidates to express their submission visually with free-hand drawing, all saved within the platform. The tool is easy to navigate, ensuring a much improved candidate experience. Based on the Excalidraw library, this new tool allows candidates to effortlessly move, modify, and delete individual elements (layers) in high resolution for an authentic digital design experience. This new tool will replace the older Essay sketch tool functionality, but both will exist concurrently until further notice. In the future, we will also be developing a new question type based on this functionality where the submitted drawing will be the marked answer.
This tool will be perfect for any assignments with free-hand note taking, such as engineering or mathematics, providing students an alternate option for showing their working, but also has applications across many other fields from art and design and assessments to medical exams.
New Post Submission Review Option - Summary Only
It is now possible for candidates to be aware of the marks they obtained in each question (identified by the question title) without having access to the question text or to their answers. The option to showcase only the summary page (named Only Summary Page in the settings) will be available by default to all customers starting with the upcoming release. This feature will protect the integrity of your questions, while still providing students a post-test window into their performance.
For a comprehensive breakdown of the post-test settings, see this help centre article: https://support.inspera.com/hc/en-us/articles/360033251151-Test-settings-After-test
Improvements and Fixes:
Test Metadata API - Metadata will return automatically generated day passwords
An assignment in Inspera may get a day password, which can get generated automatically or defined manually. Before the fix, only a manually defined day password would be returned in the API. Now, automatically generated day passwords also get returned on the day of the test. If the data is requested before the day of the test, it will be undefined as there is no password to be returned.
Custom User Roles (CUR) -
Custom User Roles have received two impactful improvements.
- Warning message when changing published roles: A warning message will now appear at the top of the screen, and will always be visible, when editing a published Customer User Role. This is to create clarity that a change has taken effect. This message will only be shown when the CUR is in a published state.
- Apply Custom Metadata Permission: This release has introduced a new CUR permission called ‘Apply Custom Metadata’, which appears in the CUR UI under the newly added section ‘Custom Metadata’ in the Author tab. This setting controls who can tag content with custom metadata and can be enabled within a CUR. Once enabled, the ‘Edit Custom Metadata’ action becomes visible in the Question and Question Set list views, allowing users to tag content in the Item Bank. Users without this permission can still view existing metadata using filters and columns, but they will not see the option to apply custom metadata to content. This permission is not enabled by default for existing roles. If you are already using Author CURs, you must manually update them to grant tagging access.
Inspera Integrity Browser
What’s New?
New Device Security Flag
Last year, we added a new capability to Inspera Integrity Browser which allows you to enable specific applications for candidates during an assessment. It’s designed for use with customer managed devices. More details can be found here:
https://support.inspera.com/hc/en-us/articles/30450389795997-Allowing-3rd-party-applications-in-IIB
To enhance this capability, we now offer a new device security flag. Where 3rd party application support is enabled in Strict, Moderate, and Moderate+Assistive Technology Test in IIB, DSF Event “Switched focus to <x>.exe third-party app” (with x being the name of the third-party application) will be logged with a new Timestamp so that the invigilator can check the proctoring video at that timestamp.
This new functionality has to be activated via the service desk and requires candidates to be using IIB version 1.16.19 or later.
Assessment Paths and Inspera Integrity Browser & Inspera Resilience Proctoring
We are delighted to announce that our assessment paths capability which allows you to group several different assessments, each with their own time windows, design and environmental settings, to be graded as a whole, is now compatible with Inspera Integrity Browser and optionally, Inspera Resilience Proctoring.
This means you can combine anything from a secure exam to an open coursework in a single path and grade them together. For a full list of features and benefits of assessment paths, please see our help centre article: https://support.inspera.com/hc/en-us/articles/9960858510237-Assessment-path-overview
The only restriction that remains is that our room scan capability in Inspera Resilience Proctoring is not available when an assessment is part of a path.
Inspera Originality
What’s New?
Moodle Inspera Originality Plugin (Open Beta)
We are excited to announce that we are developing a direct integration into the Moodle assignment workflow that allows students and graders to see an IO report within the associated module. This new implementation goes beyond our existing Moodle LTI integration which currently allows students and educators to login, but requires separate submissions to IO and the Moodle assignment. Going forward, students will submit their work once and this will be synchronised across both Moodle and IO with this plugin active, which Educators can easily review from within their assignment. Institutions will be able to customise specific settings within Moodle, including setting their own similarity threshold and AI authorship prediction.
To find out more about how to participate, please get in touch with your account manager. We look forward to hearing your feedback.
Search By Email Capability: Administrators and educators will be able to search for users by email. This new functionality will be available on the Users page for both user types to enhance search efficiency.
Email Notifications for Content Access and Student Requests: Administrators will receive email notifications for document access requests (Content Access), namely denoting whether access for document access requests has been granted or revoked. Similarly, educators will receive email notifications for student requests related to assignment submission, precisely regarding late submission, resubmission, and resubmission after deadline requests.
Ability for Administrator to View Educator Personal Uploads: Administrators will be able to view and access personal uploads made by Educator users. This functionality enhances administrative oversight by extending visibility beyond standard system-wide student submissions to also include personal Educator uploads.
Improvements and Fixes:
Search Functionality: Enhanced search functionality allows users to quickly locate specific institutions within each section, making access configuration more efficient and improving the overall user experience.
Updated Response for Document Status Check Endpoint: The response for the Document Status Check endpoint has been updated to also include the overall originality score for a submitted document.
Automatic Removal of Author Information in Metadata Analysis: Previously, the author flag appeared in Metadata Analysis even when no author information was associated with a submitted document. From the January release onwards, the author flag is automatically removed and will not appear in the Metadata Analysis list when no author information is available.