Choosing Inspera Assessment
Is Inspera Assessment the right option for my assessment?
Start with our short online questionnaire to help you decide whether to consider Inspera Assessment for your assessment.
Is it the right time to move to Inspera?
There are factors to consider beyond whether Inspera Assessment is the right technological tool for what you want to achieve with your assessment, including:
- The time you have available to learn. Staff and students have overwhelmingly commented that Inspera is user-friendly, but you still need some time to learn the platform. You may also need to engage in some assessment re-design and think about ways to ‘work smart’, including re-purposing content for future assessment.
- Your teaching team. Will they be assisting to build the assessment in Inspera or will they be marking and providing feedback? Many staff have been able to mark in Inspera with no training, but it is recommended that you have budget to allow your tutors to attend a one-hour marking workshop to learn to mark and provide feedback in Inspera if required.
- Professional staff in your school with administration of assessment responsibilities. They will need access to Inspera if they are supporting you.
- Commitment to optimise the student experience. Consider the time required to communicate with students, provide familiarisation opportunities and feedback, and test your assessment to ensure it is user-friendly for students.
Despite current resourcing pressures, many teaching teams are implementing Inspera in their courses in line with the goal of creating assessment tasks that are authentic, challenging, and meaningful. The provision of support and expertise either through partnerships with learning designers or colleagues is less risky, more cost-effective (and way more fun!) than academics working on their own.
What platform should I use for my type of assessment?
Recommendation key
Inspera is UQ’s best option |
Consider Inspera or another platform |
Recommend another platform at this stage |
Inspera is not suitable in this case |
Formative/low-weighted assessment
| Assessment type | Recommendation | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Tutorial / problem set |
| Inspera’s range of automatically marked questions, multimedia capabilities and automated feedback means you can develop engaging and authentic tasks for students. H5P and Blackboard Test are other tools you might consider. |
| Diagnostic quiz / Check for understanding summaries / Revision task / Test | ||
| ‘Scaffolding’ modules | ||
| Inspera is UQ’s best option. |
Written assessment
| Assessment type | Recommendation | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Broken down step-by-step assignment |
| Inspera is UQ’s best option. |
| Single or multiple case study assessment |
| Inspera is UQ’s best option. |
| Written assignments including essays, reports, treatment plans, other professional work artefacts |
| Inspera is suitable for all kinds of written assignments. If you currently use Turnitin Feedback Studio, you may wish to compare Inspera with Turnitin to see what suits best. Turnitin is integrated within Inspera for essay and file upload-type questions. It is integrated at the question level. A similarity report is generated on each individual question – you do not get a similarity report on the assessment overall. It is not student-facing for educative purposes. |
| Group submission |
| Inspera has Group submission. Groups can be purposefully or randomly assigned or setup by students. Only one submission per group is permitted, and the group receives one mark. Individuals cannot be given separate marks. Turnitin or Blackboard Assignment are other tools you might consider. |
Other assessment
| Assessment type | Recommendation | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Video/audio submission |
| Inspera has a File upload question type that allows the submission of any file type including videos. Kaltura is another tool you might consider. |
| Oral assessment (vivas, professional discussions) |
| Inspera has both an Audio record question type, and an Oral exam functionality. Contact the eAssessment team to discuss your options. If the assessment is less than 20% and you don’t need to keep a record of the oral, a no-submission Turnitin assignment might be an option. |
| Workplace-based assessment |
| Inspera provides easy access for external assessors in Inspera. Contact the eAssessment team to discuss your options, or seek advice on using the UQ ePortfolio. |
Examinations
| Assessment type | Recommendation | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| On-campus Bring Your Own Laptop (BYOL) digital invigilated exam |
| Inspera Assessment with Safe Exam Browser is UQ’s only option. |
| On-campus BYOL hybrid digital/paper invigilated exam |
| Inspera Assessment with Inspera Scan paper is UQ’s only option. |
| On-campus BYOL digital invigilated exam where controlled access to other software (e.g. Excel) or digital resources is required |
| Inspera Assessment is UQ’s only option. |
| At-home non-invigilated exam (including ‘take-home’ examinations) |
| Consider Inspera Assessment or another exam technology option. Turnitin is integrated with Inspera on essay and file upload question types to discourage copy/paste, and students sharing answers. |
| At-home “record and review” invigilated exam |
| Inspera Exam Portal is an advanced lockdown browser that can be used with Inspera Assessment to achieve this. |
| At-home “live supervision” invigilated exam |
| Inspera Smarter Proctoring is not yet available. Consider Zoom invigilation or ProctorU. |
| Dual mode invigilated exam with students simultaneously on-campus or at-home |
| Inspera Assessment is UQ’s only option. Only ‘record and review’ invigilation is currently available. |
When Inspera is not recommended
| Assessment type | Recommendation | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Wholly paper-based assessment |
| For online marking of entirely paper-based assessment, consider Gradescope. |
| Peer assessment |
| Seek advice on using: Inspera does not currently have peer assessment functionality. |
| Self-rating assessment |
| Seek advice on using the UQ ePortfolio which facilitates self-assessment. Students cannot rate or mark themselves in Inspera. However, you can develop tasks that provide students with opportunities to develop evaluative judgement (the ability to judge the quality of their own and others’ work). |
| Annotation assignment (students examine, critique and comment directly on an object) |
| Cirrus or UQ ePortfolio are recommended. Students cannot currently annotate images or video in Inspera. |
| Digital portfolio of work or website |
| Seek advice on using the UQ ePortfolio. Blackboard assignment allows the submission of links to artefacts produced online. |
| Turnitin text matching report used as a teaching tool |
| The Inspera/Turnitin integration is not a student-facing function – it is a tool for the grader. It is not set up to be an educative tool to teach students to properly acknowledge sources as well as highlight possible plagiarism issues. If that educative aspect is a critical part of your assessment, then you should use Turnitin, not Inspera. |
Do you want to experiment with Inspera first?
As a UQ staff member, you can request access to the Inspera Assessment training environment, so you can experiment freely with the platform and decide whether or not it meets all your needs.
Need further guidance?
Book a 45-minute Inspera Assessment design consultation with a learning designer from the eAssessment team. We would love to help you.
Ready to move your assessment?
If you have read the above information and believe that Inspera Assessment will meet your assessment needs, then find out how you can express your interest and gain access to the platform.
Contact
General enquiries can be addressed to the Digital Assessment Team (see Digital Assessment Learning Designers). For assessment design and technical support using Inspera Assessment, review our support options.