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Inspera Update – January 2026

Inspera Martin Jenkins

Colleagues, Happy New Year.  This January 2026 Inspera update provides details of opportunities to pilot some Inspera developments, information on a new drawing tool and some reminders to help with setting up tests for the new Blocks and Semester. 

Inspera updates

New Drawing Tool

The new Drawing Tool has been launched to enhance how candidates visually express their work within the platform. It is intuitive, easy to use, and supports free-hand drawing across a range of question types, with all work saved directly in the system. Built on the Excalidraw library, the tool allows users to move, edit, and delete individual elements in high resolution, offering a smooth and flexible digital drawing experience.

The tool will replace the existing Essay sketch functionality, although both will run in parallel for the time being. Future developments will introduce a dedicated question type where the drawing itself forms the assessed submission.

This tool is particularly well suited to disciplines such as engineering and mathematics for showing working, but it also has wide applicability across art and design, assessments, and medical exams.

Inspera help centre articles:

               Adding drawing tool to questions

How to grade questions with drawings

               How to use the drawing tool (for candidates)

Authoring update

Inspera will be updating the Author interface, where Questions and Question Sets are created, early in 2026.  We do now have access to the new Author interface on our Staging tenancy, 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. For this reason, Inspera Originality (IO), a tool that provides similarity, plagiarism, and AI-detection reports, has been activated on the test tenancy.

IO will be piloted to evaluate its capabilities in comparison to Turnitin. The pilot will be conducted through a 2-hour workshop. During the workshop, participants will be introduced to the IO tool and given the opportunity to:

  1. set up a written assessment that require an originality report;
  2. upload sample work to evaluate the presentation and usefulness of IO reports, including AI-authorship detection;
  3. upload past assignments to compare IO reports with those generated by Turnitin; and
  4. review the data and analytics available through the IO administration dashboard.

After the activities above, the participants will discuss their experience using the IO tool and its potential for university-wide use.

We welcome colleagues to participate in the IO pilot. To participate, please complete the poll below before 22nd January and we will send you a calendar invite.

Inspera Originality Workshop (Pilot)

Reminders- Getting ready for semester 2 and Block 3

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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