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.
