Our June release is now live!

We are delighted to share the latest updates and improvements to Inspera Assessment, Inspera Proctoring and Inspera Originality. As always, this and all previous release notes can be found on our Help Center.

Inspera Assessment

New Author - General Availability

We are delighted to announce that our much anticipated new authoring tool will move to general availability from the June release. 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.

Before we get into the details, some important timelines. We know that you want to be in control of when the new tool is used at your institution.

The headlines are:

1. Our current legacy author environment is not being switched off until the January 2028 release (ie about 18 months time)
2. New Author will be the only authoring environment from the January 2028 release onwards
3. 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

• June 2026 release to January 2027 release
  • Legacy author (the current environment) will remain available in your tenancy
  • You can choose to switch on New Author.
  • If you have both environments switched on, your authors can switch between the two.
  • You can choose to switch off legacy author.
• January 2027 release to January 2028 release
  • If you have chosen to switch off legacy author by this point, then you will just see New Author.
  • If you still have legacy author switched on, then we will also switch on New Author. Your authors will be able to switch between the two
• January 2028 release onwards
  • Only New Author will be available.
  • Legacy Author will no longer be available for use.

Inspera’s new authoring environment builds upon all the rich capabilities of our current authoring tool with a newer, modernised authoring experience. With a host of new features and insights when authoring questions and question sets, you can enhance and innovate, improve efficiency and ultimately the student experience.

Here are just some of the reasons to be excited:

• Bulk Question Creation - save time and improve efficiency by creating questions in bulk.
• New UI - A new and improved UI to make streamline authoring and make onboarding your question designers easier than ever.
• Version comparison - compare changes in the platform as your authors create questions.
• Question Set View - View the Question Set structure on the same screen as the authoring tools.

However, there is one limitation. New Author currently does not have the functionality to support Bands and Criteria marking type. Existing questions that use Bands and Criteria will continue to be allowed and Authors can continue to view and work with existing content that uses Bands and Criteria. For new content, Rubrics will be the preferred and recommended marking framework moving forward.

To find out more, or for support with the adoption of new Author, contact your account manager.

Inspera Docs - General Availability

We are also excited to announce the release of Inspera’s new paper scanning tool, Inspera Docs. Supporting paper based answers in a digital assessment platform is essential for certain subjects. It allows you to combine the best of both worlds, harnessing the power of digital even where paper is a necessity.

Inspera Docs will replace our existing Inspera Scan solution. There are a number of advantages:

1. You are no longer restricted to specific scanners with specialist software. Now, so long as you follow our minimum scanning requirements, any scanner can be used allowing you to scan almost wherever you want
2. We have modernised our approach and candidates no longer have to fill in boxes to indicate numbers. We are using optical character recognition to match pages with the right place in an overall digital submission.

Where Inspera Docs is used on an assessment, each candidate sees a code unique to them and that question on screen. They simply enter that data into the pre-printed corner of the paper supplied to them and are free to use the rest of the page to answer the question.

The new Inspera Docs interface is embedded into Inspera Assessment and contains robust uploading and quality assurance workflows to ensure that the right page is matched with the right candidate. The optical character recognition does all the heavy lifting, and alerts you to any omissions or discrepancies. Once all uploads are confirmed, you are able to get on with grading and giving feedback.

As before, no special paper is required. Ordinary paper, if printed with the template we make available to you for the boxes required by the candidate to enter their question code, can be used. Up to 1000 pages can be uploaded at a time, making this a truly scalable solution.

For support moving from Inspera Scan to Inspera Docs, please contact your account manager.

Other improvements

300 Committee Limit on a Single Test Event

As the number of institutions using Inspera grows, we want to ensure the system remains dependable. In order to ensure continued performance, we are adding a new limit to committees on any single test event. With the June release we will prevent adding more than 300 committees on one test event. Customers who have previously breached this limit have already been contacted, so if you haven’t heard from us, you haven’t reached this threshold.

Speaking Test - Automatic Recording

We have added optionality for the Audio Record question type to automatically start recording when candidates navigate to audio record question and automatically stop it when they navigate away, removing the need for the candidate interaction with the recording element.This will ensure that the recording is captured, and make the question type more accessible. Candidates are able to re-record by pressing the record button. This functionality is a tenant wide setting that will apply to all Audio Record questions after activation, it cannot be selected per question or test. To activate this feature, please reach out to the Inspera Service Desk.

Updates to Marking Navigation

This release also brings two new features to make navigating the marking process. Note, these are only available if you have enabled the new marking navigation options released over the last few months.

• "X out of Y questions not completely marked" card
  When a Grader goes to Grading Overview they will see a card saying "x out of y questions not completely marked. Go to Marking with unmarked filter applied.” When clicking, the Grader is taken to Marking, Mark by Question is selected and the unmarked questions and incomplete marking candidates filters are applied. If all questions are marked, then the card says “All y questions are completely marked.”
   
• With answers filter for Candidates - Inspera Assessment has a new filter called "with answers” within Mark by Candidate and Mark by Question filters. If Mark by Candidate is selected, it lists the candidates that have answered at least one question. If Mark by Question is selected it lists the candidates that have answered the selected question. When the "answered questions" filter is also applied, it will allow the Grader/Planner to navigate only through the questions that have an answer.

For all customers with the new navigation and mark by question enabled, planners will no longer be able to view the Incomplete Marking filter. This follows the same logic of Planners not having access to the "unmarked questions" filter. Graders will continue to have access to this filter.

Inspera Originality

Applicable to all versions and integrations of Inspera Originality

Students to be able to upload from multiple institutions

Where a student is registered at multiple institutions, Inspera Originality will now permit them to submit where previously they could only submit via one institution.

Third-party libraries to be included by default

The "third-party libraries" in the educator uploads will be removed as they are by default included in the matching process.

Improved report navigation through ‘Show next’

We’ve added a ‘Show next’ button in the similarity report which allows users to easily navigate between findings without having to click them individually. This provides two ways to navigate the report to suit the preference of users.

Applicable only in standalone version of Inspera Originality

Queue banner visible for the user on busy period

Where there are longer than usual waiting times for a document to be processed, we now display a banner so that users are aware. The banner disappears when waiting times return to normal levels.

Institution and department to not be empty on unit creation

When creating a student, educator, or subject, the values for Institution and Department will have a default value, saving users time.

Active/inactive context for users

There is a tooltip to inform the administrators what "active" and "inactive" educators mean in the user interface.

“Master" year dropdown in the administrator/educator dashboard

There is a dropdown that will apply to the whole admin/educator dashboard instead of each section having a separate one.

Administrators to see the reason for failure in submissions

Administrators are now able to see why a document has failed and get more context on the document failure.

Irrelevant data removed from Administrator dashboard

Should an institution not have translation or AI prediction enabled, the graphs will not be visible in the administrator dashboard.

Applicable to the Inspera Originality / Inspera Assessment integration only

New Settings for IA-IO Integration

Two new settings are now available within the Inspera Originality - Inspera Assessment integration: metadata analysis and whitelist characters. To activate the metadata analysis setting, please contact the service desk

Choose between displaying an originality percentage or classification in the Grader view

At a tenant level, you can now decide if Graders see an originality classification (high/medium/low) or a percentage. Please contact the service desk if you would like this changed to a percentage.

‘Your uploads’ section can now be hidden

Inspera Originality gives educators an ability to upload documents directly to generate a report through the ‘Your uploads’ function. Following customer feedback we now have the ability to turn this off at a tenant level if you don’t educators to have this capability. The default remains that they can. Please contact our service desk if you would like to switch this off.

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.

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.

With the June Release, we continue to polish, fix bugs and introduce new functionality as we work towards the General availability of Grading Workflows. With this release we have introduced:

the first iteration of the marks download option at a Phase level

Approved/Not Approved comments now appear the dashboard

other grader marks now appear in Grade if visibility is enabled in the workflow

To get involved, provide feedback and map Grading Workflows to your institutional approach, contact your account manager.

Drawing Question Type (New Author) - Early Access

Early this year, we promoted our new drawing tool which allows candidates to draw and annotate within our other question types. 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.

This new question type is only available if an institution is also participating in the new New Author early access programme.

To get involved and provide feedback, contact your account manager.