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Inspera Update – December 2025

Inspera Martin Jenkins

Colleagues, this December 2025 Inspera update provides details of opportunities to pilot some Inspera developments and information on the introduction of mandatory questions.  This update also includes some reminders as we enter the grading period and look forward to setting up new assessments for Semester 2/Block 3.  A separate communication will be provided in the new year on the introduction of Item Banks and associated functionality.  We will also be providing briefing sessions on those changes.  This update does include a ‘reminder’ on how you can start to organise your assessment content ready for the move to Item banks.

Wishing you all a restful festive season.

Inspera updates

Mandatory Questions

It will now be possible to create a test that includes Mandatory Questions.  These questions must be answered before the students submit their test answers.  Inspera have introduced this feature in response to request from Inspera users who use questions that require students to submit crucial, required information—such as metadata for theses or other necessary preliminary or demographic data.

Making questions mandatory must therefore be used with care.  If used, it is important to be aware that if students do not complete the mandatory question before the test end time, they will be unable to submit their responses, this would also apply where auto-submit has been enabled.  This would then require the test being opened for resubmission for the student.  By marking a question as mandatory, it is therefore essential to ensure that the students know they must answer it before they can submit their test.

Mandatory Questions Inspera Help Centre article

Authoring update

Inspera will be updating the Author interface, where Questions and Question Sets are created, early in 2026.  Before then we will have the new Author interface activated on our Staging tenancy, where updates can be tested, to allow it be previewed and to provide feedback.  If you are interested in trying out the new interface and would be prepared to commit to providing feedback to Inspera then please complete the form below and we can then ensure you have access to preview the new interface.

Inspera Development – Author Interface Pilot

Inspera Originality pilot

Coventry University Group adopted Inspera in 2023 with the long-term aim of managing all assessments through the platform. To date, core and time-constrained assessments have transitioned to Inspera. The next step is to support submissions that require an originality report. To achieve this, Inspera Originality (IO), a tool that provides similarity, plagiarism, and AI-detection reports, will be piloted to evaluate its capabilities in comparison to Turnitin.

For this purpose, IO will be activated from January 2026 on both the main Inspera tenancy and the test tenancy. All staff will be able to explore IO in both environments, with the test tenancy offering a more secure space for development as it is not accessible to students.

Potential ways to engage with the pilot include:

  • Uploading sample work to the test tenancy to evaluate IO report presentation or test its AI authorship functionality.
  • Uploading past assignments to compare IO reports with Turnitin. Please note that Turnitin integration remains active in Aula, therefore prior student submissions are stored in Turnitin’s database. As a result, IO reports will not check against students’ previous submissions. This being said, similarity indices from other databases will still be compared.
  • Setting up written assignments that require an originality report.
  • Gathering student feedback on the usability of the self-check process and the clarity of the report outputs.

We welcome colleagues who would like to participate in the IO pilot. Please complete the form below so we can contact you to arrange an introductory workshop on IO and its features.

Inspera Development – Inspera Originality Pilot

Reminders

Grading

  • Access to the Grade module in Inspera is through the Grader or Planner roles.  When in Grade there are different workspaces for each role in the left hand menu and the views you have are slightly different for each role. So for example:
    • If you wish to monitor scores that students are achieving while a test is open this is best viewed through the Grader role
  • Multiple attempts – to view each individual ‘child’ in Grade these are accessed through the test set up page in the Deliver module.  Go to your test in Deliver and on the set up page you will see the ‘child’ tests listed with the option to open in Grade.

Scheduling tests

  • Aula integration – when scheduling your tests for Semester 2/Block 3 a reminder that it is the Assignment Block integration which automatically adds students from Aula into Inspera and provides grade pass back.
  • Naming conventions – when creating your questions and question sets and then scheduling do please remember to use the required naming conventions.  These were updated in September to reflect the move to Block delivery.
    • With the move to Item Banks your assessment content will be located with other assessment content in that Item Bank.  Ensuring your questions and question sets are clearly identified will therefore be essential to ensure you can easily locate them for adding to tests and reuse.  If your questions and question sets are not yet clearly labelled, they will need to be updated when the content is moved across to Item Banks in 2026.

Useful links and Inspera Support Information

Inspera support links:

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