University of Iceland on the Path of Fully Digital Assessment
The University of Iceland is committed to make all their exams digital in the following few semesters by implementing Inspera Assessment across all faculties.
University of Iceland’s commitment to EdTech
The Icelandic university, ranked among the 201-250 best universities in the world, has always readily embraced new technologies and made the use of ICT in education a priority. Hreinn Pálsson, Director of Examinations at the University of Iceland, explains how the university has been looking for an online assessment software that best covers their needs. Mr Pálsson soon focused his search in Scandinavia, since today it is a pioneering region in the use of educational technology in the classroom. After a comprehensive review of many different vendors, the university decided that Inspera Assessment best suited their needs and requirements.
Making the transition from pen-and-paper to digital exams is a challenge for any educational institution. This was certainly the case for Iceland University, which will implement digital assessments for all their courses and subjects in the near future. However, Mr Pálsson adds that he had the confidence to transform Iceland University’s current educational practices because Inspera has the experience and expertise from successfully guiding the transformation for numerous universities all over the nordic countries.
Hreinn Pálsson, Director of Examinations at the University of Iceland. (Image: property of University of Iceland)
Inspera, encouraging new forms of assessment
Our mission at Inspera is to make education more inclusive, fair and relevant in the 21st century. As the European market is increasingly embracing e-assessment, we are excited to offer the most innovative and reliable digital assessment software to a great variety of education institutions.
Inspera is a leader in high-stakes e-examinations, with a full service cloud-based SaaS solution. Our solution is trusted by the leading universities, schools, awarding bodies and governments. We deliver millions of online exams every year.
The main benefits of using Inspera Assessment
The University of Iceland is currently working on connecting Inspera with their Intranet solution, Ugla. They aim to fully integrate students’ grades and courses with their summative evaluations. Hreinn Pálsson and his team expect that Inspera Assessment will bring several key benefits. These benefits include the opportunity to take advantage of the numerous question types that our platform offers, as well as the possibility to manage students’ submissions and diverse types of assessment. Therefore, Inspera Assessment is perfect for remote examinations, and available to any student or staff regardless of the location.
The implementation of the new software also provides financial and environmental benefits, mainly due to minimising exams’ paper trail. Finally, the solution will also reduce cheating and plagiarism thanks to Safe Exam Browser (SEB), which blocks access to all non-whitelisted web pages, other programs and files under exam. All these wins can be translated as time and cost effectiveness.
Within a few years this situation will be reversed and only students with computer phobia will use writing utensils when taking their exams.
Inspera Assessment has already been used for different examinations, with successful outcomes. Mr Pálsson says that: “Within a few years this situation will be reversed and only students with computer phobia will use writing utensils when taking their exams.” However, it will take several semesters to complete the implementation of Inspera Assessment across all the University’s faculties.
The before and after of the classrooms at the University of Iceland (Image: property of University of Iceland)
Finally, if you would like to learn more about the University of Iceland’s digitisation journey, check out their recent blog post on how exams at the University will change radically.
Learn more?
We have received great feedback from academic staff and students from all the institutions that have trialled our e-assessment platform. For instance, the University of Bergen, which has a similar size to the University of Iceland, first started implementing Inspera Assessment in 2015. In the first year of the trial, the University of Bergen conducted 5% of its exams in our platform, while in the second year, they reached 67% of total examinations.
Do you want to learn more about how our customers are transitioning to online assessment? Read about their unique journeys to inclusive, fair and relevant assessment in our Customer Case Studies.
Written by Jo Bowden
December 11, 2018
