What We Learned at the Federation of Awarding Bodies 2023 Conference
The Federation of Awarding Bodies Annual Conference returned at the start of this month in Leicester, UK. Having attended in 2022, this year Inspera proudly both exhibited and sponsored an award, and met so many people working hard to deliver high quality certifications and awards.
What Inspera Offers Awarding and Certification Bodies
We’re particularly excited about the growing appetite and appreciation for digital assessment – there is much activity in the UK assessment space at present. There’s a real sense of change as our national and devolved governments, the regulators and awarding organizations alike look at the future of qualifications and assessment.
Inspera is helping lead the way in digital transformation, working with our awarding organization clients in the UK and Scandinavia to deliver both formative and high-stakes assessments in schools and at centers internationally, complimenting our work in the further and higher education sectors.
Inspera’s end-to-end assessment platform provides authors with the tools to create authentic assessments with a wide range of both objective and subjective question types including simulations.
What We Learned
So this is what we found out when talking to attendees at the conference and the awards event:
1. Candidate Experience is Key
Candidate experience is critical to success – ensuring that the assessments are accessible, engaging and easy to use. The assessment software should never get in the way of the candidate, or add extra stress for the candidate; it needs to “just work” from the candidate’s point of view.
Enabling detailed insights into the full lifecycle of test content through our reporting capabilities and innovative approaches to monitoring item bank health ensure both that the candidate experience and the validity of each assessment are maintained and enhanced.
Just as importantly, the Inspera Assessment platform offers peace of mind through virtually unlimited scalability thanks to our modern, highly scalable technology underpinnings.
2. Digital Assessment is Gaining Momentum
We’re really excited how digital transformation plans in the UK assessment sector are really gaining momentum – for example, in Wales the new “Made for Wales” GCSEs will be assessed primarily digitally, and across the UK nations there is an appetite for digital delivery across a variety of assessments spanning formative to summative.
3. The Three Pillars: Validity, Security and Reliability
A theme common across the nation’s regulators is that assessments must of course be valid, fair, secure and reliable. Inspera helps our clients meet these needs with our advanced security and resilience features alongside our flexible and robust marking features that support a range of workflows offering true flexibility to awarding organizations, schools and training providers no matter what the purpose or subject of the assessment.
The benefits of digital transformation are clear – more engaging, authentic assessments for the candidate, whilst offering awarding organizations a more cost effective and efficient means of delivering differentiated assessments for formative, diagnostic and summative purposes.
4. Open to Innovative Assessment Types
The transformation to digital assessment enables awarding organizations to effectively evaluate learner and candidate skills and knowledge in a variety of ways simply not possible on paper. Inspera is at the forefront in this area, with support for a wide variety of question types that enable skills and knowledge to be tested in a variety of complementary ways.
5. Remote Means Scalability
Digital assessment with Inspera also offers scope for remote delivery – taking advantage of Inspera Proctoring, that offers both lock-down resilient assessment delivery together with record and review remote invigilation. We heard several awarding organizations say they truly believe remote delivery options will help learners to engage in learning activities and achieve qualifications that they may not otherwise engage in if they had to travel to a test center, offering further opportunities for learners to reach and demonstrate their potential.
With Inspera’s in-built integrity capabilities, we help ensure remotely delivered assessments are as fair, valid, secure, reliable and accessible as those delivered in-center.
What’s Happening in the Awarding Bodies Sector?
Whilst digital is clearly the future, there is also much turmoil in the UK market – what does the government’s proposal around the Advanced British Standard mean for the future of A-Level and T-Level qualifications for example?
A key question is how to facilitate the transition from paper-based assessments to adopt and take advantage of digital assessment, whilst ensuring equality of access and the validity of the assessments themselves both in terms of difficulty and accessibility. This is where Inspera has real-world experience in working with awarding organization clients delivering high stakes assessments internationally, using our platform to successfully transform long-standing assessments delivered primarily on paper to onscreen digital delivery.
The data and insights that we can provide with our comprehensive insight and reporting tools, alongside the validation and quality assurance processes we support throughout the authoring and quality assurance phase including pre-testing, standards fixing and continuous monitoring of item performance data to ensure test content remains valid.
A Big Thank You
Finally, we must say that Inspera was delighted to have sponsored and presented the Federation of Awarding Bodies Award for Awarding Organisation and Provider Relationship of the Year, which was won by Gateway Qualifications and Calderdale College. We chose to sponsor this award because we believe the relationship between awarding organizations and their centers is key to candidate success and outcomes, and it’s by working in partnership that the best outcomes can be achieved for all learners. Well done to all the nominees too.
We look forward to being back at the FAB Conference next year.
Written by Simon Trevers
December 18, 2023