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The Inspera ecosystem is designed to work seamlessly with your existing technology using internationally recognized standards.

These standards allow for the control and flow of information, data and platform usability between technology solutions. This creates a more cohesive experience for users, while supporting the institution’s technology goals and objectives. By including these in our solutions, we ensure as smooth an integration process as possible, allowing for customized requirements.

What Are the Technology Standards?

The five assessment technology standards to ensure interoperability and a more integrated and customized assessment experience for your educational institution are:

  • Identity and Access Management
  • Student Information Systems
  • Existing questions
  • Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)
  • Open APIs

 

Identity and Access Management

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Single Sign-On (SSO) provides many benefits, not least that after users sign in to one of the services at an institution, they are automatically authenticated into any other service that uses SSO. The user is only required to remember one set of credentials.

In general, adding support for a new identity provider only requires minor work, assuming one of the following standards is supported: SAML 2 or OAuth OpenId Connect.

For most of these integrations, a Privacy by design scheme for Inspera Assessment can be used to de-identify personal data. In this way, it is impossible to connect personal data to an identifiable learner without the use of additional information stored outside of our assessment platform.

 

Student Information Systems

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Inspera supports integration with Student Information Systems (SIS) to offer synchronization from the SIS to retrieve information about users, roles, groups and learner’s assessment enrolments, and in some cases also transferring results back to the SIS after marking and/or grading has been completed. Integrations to a SIS greatly relieves the administrative work involved in managing assessments and reduces risks of errors in the processing of student and assessment data. We have both built in support for certain SISs and bespoke integrations can also be supported through the extensive Inspera APIs.

 

Existing Questions

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Inspera uses IMS Question and Test Interoperability Specification (QTI) to allow you to import questions from other assessment platforms and export to them. This means years of good practice can be retained and improved upon instead of starting from scratch.

 

Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)

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Inspera can be launched as a tool from an LMS using Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) allowing candidates to be assessed directly through your existing platforms. Student data flows from the LMS to Inspera and grades can be passed back.

 

Open APIs

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For more complex integrations the preferred way to integrate is via the Inspera Assessment open APIs. Inspera Assessment’s set of REST APIs include:

  • Support for creating and updating tests, including enrolment and access arrangements
  • Support for retrieving test results, including learner responses, their scores, and metadata
  • Support for reading, updating, and creating assessment content
  • Access to the API is controlled via OAuth using API Keys defined either for regular users or for dedicated system users in Inspera Assessment.

Written by Ishan Kolhatkar

December 2, 2023
Online Assessments