LEARN, Sri Lanka’s National Research and Education Network (NREN), is proactively addressing the growing demand for innovative assessment solutions in today’s rapidly evolving educational landscape. As higher education institutions face increasing challenges in maintaining academic integrity and adapting assessments to digital learning environments, LEARN recently organised a webinar in collaboration with Inspera, a global leader in secure and flexible assessments—the event aimed to highlight solutions from the company that can help institutions navigate these challenges.
The webinar featured presentations by Kim Waldgrave, Head of Asia at Inspera, Puravina Periasamy, Solutions Engineer, and Ida Rahim, Senior Sales Executive. Together, they showcased Inspera’s integrated platform, which offers a comprehensive suite of tools for assessment design, originality checking, and proctoring. As digital learning continues to expand and AI becomes a larger part of educational practices, the need for secure, adaptable, and accessible assessment solutions has never been more critical. Inspera’s tools were presented as a response to these shifting dynamics, providing a flexible, scalable, and secure way to conduct assessments.
By hosting this event, LEARN reinforced its ongoing commitment to fostering collaboration between technology providers and academic institutions. This collaboration ensures that Sri Lanka’s education system remains at the forefront of innovation, equipping both educators and students with the tools needed for future success. The webinar also builds on previous initiatives by LEARN, such as its exploration of Generative AI in assessments, further aligning its efforts to integrate advanced technology into the heart of education.
Inspera’s Holistic Solution for Enhancing Academic Integrity
Inspera provides an integrated, flexible, and secure platform for assessments, proctoring, and originality investigation. Designed with the integrity of academic evaluations at its core, it offers customisable, scalable solutions that cater to diverse institutional needs. “Inspera’s ecosystem delivers a holistic assessment environment, enabling higher education institutes to conduct formative, summative, and diagnostic assessments with authenticity. Moreover, this platform promotes collaboration between institutions, including partnerships with NRENs and academic bodies, ensuring wide-reaching academic growth and cooperation,” shared Kim.
He continued stating, “Inspera operates within strict data protection guidelines, aligning with the EU’s GDPR standards for privacy and security, ensuring user data remains secure.” Building upon these foundations, the platform covers three major offerings: Assessment Design, Originality Checking, and Proctoring, providing a comprehensive, forward-thinking solution that higher education institutions need to meet the evolving demands of academic assessment.
Inspera also features comprehensive integrity tools, including AI, machine learning, audio recording, and lockdown browsers, all aimed at maintaining the highest academic honesty. The suite may also be integrated with institutional Student Information Systems (SIS) and Learning Management Systems (LMS), offering seamless operational processes. According to Kim, API integrations are also available, extending the system’s functionality and adaptability to suit the specific needs of any institution.
Inspera Assessment – Exploring the Learner’s Interface
Inspera ensures a seamless and flexible experience for students and educators alike by offering dynamic features that enhance the accessibility and reliability of assessments. Taking the audience through a demo of the platform, Ida shared that, “Students have the flexibility to adjust accessibility settings, such as contrast and font size, even during the assessment, ensuring that everyone can engage with the exam comfortably.” She further added that to prevent any disruptions from network issues, the entire assessment is downloaded locally once started, and progress automatically syncs when the connection is restored. This feature ensures continuous assessment without interruption.
Ida also shared that Inspera allows students to attach reference PDFs or website links as part of their answers. At the same time, network filtering can restrict access to specific web pages during exams. Pre-exam instructions can be demonstrated through a dedicated demo feature to familiarise students with the system before the assessment begins.
“The platform supports 25 diverse question types, including multiple-choice questions (MCQs), true/false, inline choices, text entries, hotspot questions, matching and pairing, graphic gap match, and more specialised formats such as numerical simulations, programming questions, audio recordings, and essay-type responses,” Ida conveyed. Additionally, Inspera’s multilingual and multimedia capabilities extend the platform’s accessibility to a wide range of learners. Furthermore, grouped questions may apply the error carried forward feature ensuring that students are not unfairly penalised and conducting a holistic assessment of students’ understanding.
In line with the latest advancements, Inspera integrates external tools like ChatGPT to screen record and track exam prompts. This tool, alongside features like question grouping and multimedia capabilities, provides a flexible and advanced assessment solution for educational institutions, enhancing exam integrity and student convenience.
Inspera Assessment – Through the Educator Lens
Inspera provides a comprehensive dashboard that allows educators to view and manage active assessments easily. “The platform offers tools for authoring, designing, and organising content, enabling educators to import questions externally or from an existing question bank and export newly authored questions back to the bank. Assessments may also be set up to be marked manually or automatically, with options for applying penalties for unanswered questions,” Ida elaborated.
Furthermore, Inspera’s metadata labelling feature helps users easily locate questions in the platform’s vast question bank, while checkmarks for different modules within the same question allow for more detailed categorisation. Rubric customisation enables educators to tailor grading criteria, and features like question reordering and randomisation enhance the assessment experience.
“In the delivery mode, educators can specify test names, set test windows and time allocations, provide test information, and add candidates either manually or via CSV. Grouping candidates with graders and implementing security settings are also possible. Therefore, collaborative grading may be facilitated through shared access, allowing for interaction between graders,” shared Ida. With this, the platform supports reviewing marks and feedback in the final grading phase, automatically converting marks into grades based on preset criteria if required.
Inspera also offers monitoring capabilities to track candidate engagement and progress, with the ability to send one-way messages or pause assessments as needed. Extra time can be allocated to any candidate, ensuring fairness and accessibility. Additionally, the grader module supports marking directly from the rubric, allowing graders to provide feedback effectively and efficiently.
Inspera Proctoring
Inspera’s secure monitoring environment is a state-of-the-art student proctoring platform that is activated when a student undertakes an assessment. It offers five types of proctoring services and supports students with special needs, ensuring inclusivity for all learners. “The most advanced suite of proctoring features, known as Resilience, ensures candidates cannot access other windows until the assessment is complete, maintaining the integrity of the process. Before starting, a system test is conducted to identify and address any issues, including checking for additional monitors. If any test fails, the system provides students with instructions on the necessary steps to take. Access to the assessment requires a username and a unique pincode for enhanced security,” Ida demonstrated.
Resilience also includes an automatic photo capture at the beginning of the test, which is used for facial recognition throughout the session, ensuring the test-taker’s identity is verified. The system syncs proctoring recordings with the server every three minutes; monitoring camera, screen, and audio activity. Key changes during the recordings are flagged by the platform for review, providing a comprehensive overview for administrators. Moreover, they can choose between open or strict assessment modes, determining whether the test must be completed in a single sitting. This robust security framework ensures a fair and controlled assessment experience for all participants.
Inspera Originality
The third feature of Inspera, its plagiarism and AI detection tool, ensures the originality and integrity of student submissions. This feature offers a comprehensive dashboard where all submissions are filtered by their level of plagiarism, providing educators with a clear overview. Sentences with varying degrees of similarity to other sources are highlighted in different colours, making it easy to identify potentially problematic sections at a glance. “A detailed sentence information box matches the highlighted text to the specific web page or source it resembles, offering transparency and context. Each document is uploaded and archived, contributing to a growing database of previous submissions, which further enhances the tool’s ability to detect similarities over time,” shared Ida. In addition to plagiarism detection, Inspera’s AI authorship feature analyses writing styles, linguistic markers, and the overall quality of the text. As per Ida, this dual approach not only ensures that academic standards are upheld but also aids in identifying writing patterns, offering a deeper understanding of each student’s unique writing style.
Advancing Educational Innovation and the Future of Assessments
Through this webinar, LEARN’s collaboration with Inspera reinforces its dedication to driving innovation in Sri Lanka’s higher education system. By introducing cutting-edge assessment technologies, LEARN is addressing the modern challenges academic institutions face in maintaining integrity and adapting assessments to the demands of digital learning environments. This webinar was a key step in LEARN’s mission to bridge the gap between technology and education, fostering meaningful partnerships with global leaders like Inspera. The event highlighted the need for secure, flexible, and scalable assessment solutions catering to educators and students, ensuring that academic practices evolve alongside technological advancements. As part of its broader strategy, LEARN continues to equip Sri Lanka’s educational institutions with tools that enhance academic integrity, promote deeper learning, and prepare students for future careers where AI and digital tools will play a central role. This webinar is yet another milestone in LEARN’s ongoing efforts, building on previous initiatives such as its exploration of Generative AI in education, to ensure the nation’s education system remains future-ready.