General Availability:
New Author - General Availability
As we mentioned in last month's release, New Author, and by extension, our new Drawing Question Type, have both moved into General Availability. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our customers who have given us feedback during the course of its development and used it while it was in our early access programme.
Once again, the headlines are:
- You can choose to switch on New Author.
- If you have both environments switched on, your authors can switch between the two.
- Our current legacy author environment is not being switched off until the January 2028 release (i.e. about 18 months time).
- New Author will be the only authoring environment from the January 2028 release onwards.
- You can choose to switch off Legacy Author at a convenient time before January 2028 if you wish, so that you are in control of the switchover.
- You can choose to switch off legacy author.
Inspera’s new authoring environment builds upon all the rich capabilities of our current authoring tool with a newer, modernised authoring experience.
However, we are also aware of a reported bug which results in the Additional resource tab not being visible in New Author without custom user roles enabled. This will be resolved as part of a minor release in July.
To find out more, or for support with the adoption of New Author, contact your account manager.
Drawing Question Type is now General Availability
Early this year, we promoted our new drawing tool which allows candidates to draw and annotate within our other question types. This new Drawing Question Type is now joining New Author in General Availability, and New Author is required to use this functionality.
This new Question Type makes the drawn submission the primary method of submission. Educators can add images and text as a background canvas, which serves as a starting point for candidates. These images can be locked to prevent them from being moved, or unlocked to allow candidates to interact with the pre-uploaded image.
To get involved and provide feedback, contact your account manager. From September, the new Drawing Question Type will be enabled for all accounts using New Author.
Inspera Assessment
Improved Control of Candidate Screen Sizes
When a candidate enters their test via the Candidate dashboard, they are now informed if their screen size is smaller than recommended, and blocked from viewing the content if it's smaller than supported. This makes it very clear if the size of their device is verified as appropriate when entering the test. This check is now also available to candidates entering tests without joining through their dashboard, eg. public demo tests. Students are then informed if their screen is smaller than recommended, or smaller than supported.
New "Submission Received" Notification
There is now a new “Submission Received" notification within Inspera Assessment. When a submission is received, a new notification "submission has been delivered for candidate or group" will appear. This allows users to receive a notification whenever a candidate submits an assignment, if the user is a contributor of that test.
This notification is disabled by default, but can be activated by contacting the Service Desk.
This option is controlled at the user level, if a user enables it, they will receive a notification for every submission of every test on which they're a contributor.
Logic Check for Rubric Marking
In New Author, when creating or editing a question, selecting "Rubrics" as the Mark option is now only possible if a Rubrics is set. The author can no longer save the question without selecting a valid Rubrics or changing to another type of marks.
Inspera Docs:
This month’s release also brings further improvements to Inspera Docs.
Comparison for Duplicate Submissions: If an Inspera Docs sheet is uploaded, and the same question code and page number combination is found on a sheet that is already allocated to a candidate submission, it is now possible to compare the old and new within the platform. Users can then choose which version to keep.
Support for uploading and reviewing sheets for specific tests:
Previously the users could only upload the scan sheets at “global level” not specific to any test. All scan sheets were added together there, and all verification of the question codes happened against all expected question codes on the tenant.
With this release, we introduce the ability to upload for a specific test. In that context, educators only see the scan sheets uploaded for the test. The verification is not only at tenant level, but for the specific test. So if you upload a sheet with a question code that exists on the tenant, but not on the test, then it is shown as an error, working as an extra security mechanism to avoid incorrect allocation of scan sheets.
Inspera Originality
Applicable to all versions and integrations of Inspera Originality:
Applicable to the Inspera Originality Moodle Plugin
New Moodle IO Plugin Version
This new version brings a lot of new features and fixes for the Inspera Originality Moodle plugin:
- Auto Refresh: When an educator has a tab open (either a submission or a list of submission), they do not need to manually refresh to see if there are new reports. Instead, the page will now auto refresh.
- New IO Settings: We have added the following settings to the Moodle configuration: exclude citations, exclude source criteria and whitelist characters.
- All Submissions visible in the Submissions Management Page: Based on your feedback, we are now listing all submissions instead of only errors, in order to give educators a complete picture of submission progress. However, in the connection settings, it is possible to define that only errors should be listed in the submissions management page, to ensure that educators using the management page only for error handling can continue to do so.
- Filter Submissions by Status: We have brought back the "originality status" filter to the submissions management page. It is also possible to select more than one status: if two filters of the same field are added, they act as an OR, if they are of different fields they act as an AND.
- Two Month Autoremoval: In order to prevent the exponential growth of the submissions management page, we are now automatically deleting submissions that are older than 2 months. The reports are still available both in Moodle and IO, but the item in the submissions management list will no longer be visible.
- Added support for Workshops and Forums activity types.
- ‘On behalf of’ Fix: Moodle offers the possibility for the teacher to submit on behalf of the student. Until now, we had an issue preventing the student from accessing the report. That was now fixed.
- Accessing Group Submission Reports: We have added support for group submissions in a previous release. However, a bug prevented other students within the group from accessing the report. That has been fixed.
- Reduce (or eliminate) "file not found" errors: ‘File not found’ is one of the most common errors listed.This error was caused when a student submitted a file and then changed their mind and replaced it with a different file. This has now been resolved.
- Send Correct Course Name: Moodle is now sending the course name, meaning IO can now group submissions by course instead of using a default one. The course will be listed in IO as -
- Send Full Assignment Name: Moodle is now sending the full assignment name, instead of just the id, making it easier for teachers and admins to identify them when using the IO standalone app. The assignment will be listed in IO as -
Single Resubmission in Assessment Page: a user with permissions to "regenerate all submissions" can now also resubmit error submissions individually in the assignment page.
Early Access
A reminder of our Early Access Programmes. Early Access allows you to try out new capabilities before they enter General Release. They can only be activated on a test tenancy and can not be used on real assessments.
To participate in an Early Access Programme, please contact your Account Manager directly.
These programmes are not handled by our Service Desk.
Grading Workflows - Early Access
Grading Workflows allow customers to design their own unique workflow, ensuring that submissions will be allocated to the relevant graders / moderators as required. The ultimate goal is for Grading Workflows to handle all workflows, removing the need for spreadsheets.
Grading Workflows also comes with a new Grader and Group allocation UI as well as a new progress dashboard so Planners can get a true overview of how grading is progressing.
With the July Release, we continue to introduce new functionality and work through bugs as we work towards the General availability of Grading Workflows. This includes:
- visibility of grading in other phases has been improved, including the addition of calculation information to relevant phases.
- the progress dashboard now updates in real time.
- the modal when closing a phase now includes a summary of how many submissions are moving to subsequent phases.
- progress animations when processing rules, and opening and closes phases have now been added so users aren't faced with a confusing wait.
- calculation rounding can now be up or down to 3 decimal places, not just integers.
- a critical bug allowing first phase marking to start before the phase has opened has been fixed.
- additional menu items, and improved captions in the Grading Workflow list menu (eg. Edit => Edit name or description, introduction of Edit Workflow option).
Grading Workflows is an enormous and ongoing piece of work that involves changing some existing Inspera functionality. This is still a work in progress, but in the coming months we will continue to polish and add new functionality.
To get involved, provide feedback and map Grading Workflows to your institutional approach, contact your account manager.