Preparing for Inspera Assessment
Before moving your assessment to Inspera, you should consider the following:
Is Inspera Assessment the right option for my assessment?
Consider the following:
- Do you want to provide students with assessment questions or tasks that relate to a case study or stimulus material of some kind?
- Do you want students to be able to observe/visually analyse something (animal behaviour, chemical process, body movement, simulated heart monitor, architectural structure) and answer questions about it?
- Do you want students to listen to something (another language, music, heart rhythm) and distinguish between sounds or demonstrate comprehension?
- Would you like to 'break-down' your assessment and design the structure in a way that scaffolds and 'steps' students through the task?
If you answered “yes” to any of the above, Inspera may be a good fit for your assessment.
If you would like to run a secure “bring your own laptop” on-campus invigilated exam, Inspera is your only option.
- the assessment is wholly paper based
- you need peer assessment functionality
- students are required to annotate images or video
- the assessment is a portfolio
- students need to rate or mark themselves. However, you can develop tasks that provide students with opportunities to judge quality.
When should I 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:
Time 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.
Teaching team
Will your teaching team 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's 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
Staff in your school with administration of assessment responsibilities will need access to Inspera if they are supporting you.
Commitment to 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.
Working in partnership
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.
Training and support
Inspera training environment
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.
See Getting started in Inspera
Formal training
To access the Inspera Assessment Production environment, there is some mandatory training you will need to undertake. See Getting started in Inspera for more information.
Assessment design support
Speak to your school/faculty learning designer who will be able to assist with things like:
- demonstrating a wide range of possibilities for creating engaging and challenging assessment
- planning a structured approach to organising your database of questions/assessments in Inspera, allowing you to re-use content later
- writing automated and embedded feedback for students, saving you time later in the semester.
We strongly encourage you to seek support as early as possible so that you will have:
- sufficient time for reviewing and testing to ensure students have a good experience and don’t panic
- time to focus on developing expertise so that you and your teaching team can become self-sufficient and potentially start to lead others.
I'm ready to move my assessment to Inspera
If you have read the above information and believe that Inspera Assessment will meet your assessment needs, then you can get started in Inspera.