December 2023 Product Release

We release updates across our products each month. Below is a summary of what’s in this month’s release and two videos containing a deeper explanation of new capabilities.

Looking ahead to 2024, our next release webinar will be on Monday 8th January. The following day, we will host our quarterly roadmap webinar.

 

One-Way Navigation

We have made improvements to our one-way navigation capabilities from both a candidate and administrator perspective. A confirmation modal now appear at the start of the assessment so that a candidate understands that they can only navigate one-way. Each response or a lack of response, generates a dismissable confirmation modal to remind the candidate. The video above walks you through the new enhanced capability in the candidate and administrator views.

 

Numerical Simulation

Our numerical simulation question type is in open beta and is popular with users. We wanted to take the opportunity to show you how powerful this question type can be, by authoring a question once and Inspera generating thousands of possible questions from the variables that you program. We also have error carry forward and answer tolerance in this capability. Finally, you can automate feedback based on candidate responses. While many use cases are in STEM subjects, there is wider potential use in any area where a mathematical formula is assessed. The video above will give you an insight into how this capability works and could be implemented in your assessments.

Accessibility Improvements

We continue our commitment to improve accessibility across our ecosystem and have recently updated our accessibility statement to include details of our VPAT.

Specifically this month we have made improvements to the new question and new test screens to improve contrast ratios and added more labels for screen readers.

 

Updated Language Support

As we continue to increase the number of languages supported in captions, in our ecosystem, we are delighted that our core product, Inspera Assessment now supports the following languages:

• English
• Norwegian (Bokmål)
• Norwegian (Nynorsk)
• Swedish
• Finnish
• German
• Spanish
• Polish
• Icelandic
• Dutch

We will continue to expand the list and our reach across the remaining products in our ecosystem over time.

Candidates remain able to write their answers in any language supported by their keyboard.

 

Bulk Release of Explanations

We’ve improved the way in which this capability operates. By giving you the ability to send general feedback to candidates with ease, you have more time to write bespoke feedback to individual candidates and improve the overall richness of the feedback they receive.

 

Access to Similarity Reports

We have increased the available configurations for access to a similarity report in Inspera. You can choose between preventing graders from seeing the report at all, making it only available to them in an overview section or making it available while they grade. This speaks to the differing ways in which integrity is safeguarded at institutions. If you want to split the role of integrity checker and grader, you can. Or if the same person undertakes both tasks, they can do so on an overview or concurrent basis.

 

Improved Pasting from Word

We know that you might already have a bank of assessments previously authored in Microsoft Word, or use it now to write a first draft so we’ve improved our paste function to retain all supported formatting when content is copied across. Writing questions natively in Inspera gives you access to the widest range of formatting options but we want to make it as easy as possible for you to author so this improvement will help if you are just using Word or a mixture of Word and Inspera.

 

​​For full details of the December release, refer to the release notes.

Written by Ishan Kolhatkar

December 7, 2023