“We feel like we are growing with the system, so we are happy to recommend it”
About Lund Municipality
Lund Municipality (Lunds kommun) is located in southern Sweden’s Skåne county and represents a progressive example of the implementation of governmental educational policies, from pre-school to university. Lund has a population of about 122,000, out of which 47,000 are university students. Furthermore, there are about 35,000 students in Lund Municipality in pre-university education. For this customer story, we interviewed Pernilla Svensson, ICT Coordinator and Systems Administrator at Lund Municipality.
Why
In March 2017, the municipality of Lund decided to tender for a digital exam solution for all of Lund's primary, secondary, upper secondary, and further adult education institutions, currently supporting about 15,000 pupils and 1,300 teaching and administrative staff.
Inspera was awarded the contract, and a full rollout started in April 2018 with the delivery of national tests in Swedish, English, and Mathematics.
The following key objectives were set for Inspera Assessment implementation:
- Improve security and prevent cheating.
- Increase diversity of question types offered in assessments.
- Provide assessment access for all student profiles.
- Have low system maintenance requirements for the ICT team.
- Allow integration with other systems, such as single-sign-on (SSO).
‘When implementing digital exams, we experienced that we could gain higher quality with less time spend. Usually, it is the other way around. Digital exams have basically changed the way we work and have made it much easier to share the responsibilities connected with the assessment process,' underlines Valeriia Gorlushko.
A question bank (a database of all the available online assessment questions for a subject) supports the examiners' job of setting questions. The academic staff responded positively to both the functionality and design offered by Inspera Assessment.
In addition, a research and development (R&D) team at Inspera worked closely with the Oxford Medical Sciences Division to advance the learning analytics tools available in the platform.
How
The first national tests were delivered over the course of 4 days, with about 1,250 students taking the exams per day and 5 schools participating.
To support the Lund Municipality education community, the ICT Coordination team consisted of 6 full-time professionals. The decision was made that only ICT team staff were given access to Inspera Assessment in order to plan and deliver the exams in the initial implementation phase. ‘The way we excluded the teachers in the beginning, until we showed them everything that is possible with Inspera Assessment, won us crucial support later on. Help from Inspera at the start, when we first rolled out the national tests, was a big success factor’, concludes Pernilla Svensson.
The initiative “teachers training the teachers” has now been implemented. In addition to that, Inspera has been running regular training workshops with the ICT Coordination team to train them to provide first-line support to schools and their individual ICT staff.
‘Whenever we talk to principals, ICT staff, and special needs teachers, we got a positive response. People are satisfied’, says Pernilla Svensson.
The Results
Today, Year-10 to adult education students use Inspera Assessment in all subjects. The plan is to expand the implementation to include K-9 students and their teachers, with all Year 6-9 students already having taken at least one test in Inspera Assessment. Inspera Assessment is used both on school devices (Chromebook, iPad, PC, Mac) and in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) mode.
Lund Municipality has gained continuity in the assessment process, as the same assessment tool is being used from Year 6 to adult education. Furthermore, Inspera Assessment has a range of built-in accessibility functions available. ‘Inspera gave us some great everyday accessibility tools we needed’, as Pernilla adds.
Looking Ahead
When it comes to design and development for the future, the collaboration between Inspera and Lund Municipality continues in the direction of expanding possibilities of integrating different tools in relation to the local LMS, Vklass. Additional training of teachers and staff is being planned in response to adoption rates in different subjects.
Want to learn more about Bring Your Own Device? Please read the article:
'That Familiar Feeling: E-exams on Students’ Computers (BYOD)'
