Trusted Digital Assessment Infrastructure
Some things are better said than written.
Oral assessment gives students the opportunity to explain their thinking, defend their decisions, respond to challenge and demonstrate their understanding through conversation.
Its value isn’t new. But as higher education rethinks assessment for a world in which generative AI is ubiquitous, the ability to hear students articulate and apply what they know has taken on renewed importance.
The challenge is making synchronous oral assessment work at scale.
Inspera is building an end-to-end solution for Interactive Oral Assessment: from scheduling students and assessors, through secure or open delivery, to live marking, recording, transcription and moderation.
Due for release: End of Q1 2027.
Oral assessment doesn’t have to happen live. Inspera already enables students to record spoken responses using our Audio Record question type, including within a secure environment using Inspera Integrity Browser. Asynchronous oral assessment can provide flexibility and scale while giving students another way to demonstrate their knowledge beyond the written word.
But synchronous oral assessment enables something different: dialogue. An assessor can probe an answer, ask a follow-up question, introduce a new scenario or challenge an assumption. Students can explain their reasoning, defend decisions and adapt their thinking in real time. That makes it possible to assess not simply what a student knows, but how they apply, articulate and respond with that knowledge.
As institutions rethink assessment in response to generative AI, that interaction has renewed importance. Not because a live oral should become a tool for catching students out, but because it can provide powerful assurance of learning. It can stand alone as an assessment method, or follow an open assessment in which students have used the tools and resources appropriate to their discipline. The result is a richer assessment repertoire: asynchronous when flexibility matters, synchronous when interaction matters, and secure when assurance matters.
Generative AI has accelerated a conversation that was already happening.
What do we actually want assessment to tell us?
A written artefact can demonstrate a great deal. But sometimes the capability we want to assess is the student’s ability to explain an argument, defend a decision, apply knowledge to an unfamiliar situation, communicate professionally or adapt their thinking in response to a question.
That’s where oral assessment can be powerful.
Vivas, interactive oral assessments, presentations with questions, defences and competency-based conversations allow educators to assess capabilities that aren’t always visible in a final written product.
This isn’t about returning to the past.
It’s about widening the assessment palette available to educators.
Oral assessment shouldn’t become an interrogation designed to catch students using AI.
That starts from the wrong question.
The better question is: what does this student know, understand and know how to do?
A well-designed oral assessment provides another way for students to demonstrate that learning.
That makes oral assessment particularly interesting as institutions reconsider the balance between open and secure assessment.
Students might undertake authentic, open assessments in which they use contemporary tools, including generative AI, before subsequently explaining, applying or defending their work in a secure oral assessment.
Open assessment and secure assessment don’t need to compete.
They can complement each other.
The University of Sydney’s two-lane approach distinguishes between secure assessments designed to assure learning and open assessments that support learning in a world where students have access to contemporary tools.
Interactive oral assessments and vivas are examples of secure Lane 1 assessment.
But the possibilities become particularly interesting when the two lanes are connected.
Imagine a student completing an extended project in an open environment. They can research, create, iterate and, where appropriate, use AI.
Then ask them to defend it.
With Inspera Assessment Paths, institutions will be able to connect the two experiences. During a secure oral assessment, the candidate can even be given access to their previous open submission while the wider device remains locked down.
Asynchronously, you may be able to answer “Did the student produce this?” In an interactive oral assessment you can go further: “Can the student explain, defend, apply and extend the learning it represents?”
The challenge with synchronous oral assessment isn’t simply pedagogical.
It’s operational.
Hundreds of students. Multiple assessors. Different availability. Rooms. Remote candidates. Adjustments. Marking. Moderation. Recordings.
The administration can quickly become more complicated than the assessment itself.
We’re building Interactive Oral Assessment as part of Inspera’s assessment infrastructure rather than as a standalone video tool.
Institutions can create schedules manually, allow students to select from available slots, or use intelligent scheduling to allocate students to assessors based on availability and institutional requirements.
One student. One assessor or several. On campus or remote.
The infrastructure adapts to the assessment design rather than dictating it.
Interactive Oral Assessment will sit inside Inspera.
Scheduling. Candidate management. Assessment delivery. Secure delivery where required. Recording. Marking. Transcription. Moderation.
All within the assessment environment.
Assessors can access the information they need during the conversation, including questions, resources, previous submissions and marking criteria.
They can mark against their rubric as the assessment happens or return to the recording and transcript afterwards.
Where multiple assessors are involved, each can make their own judgement before established Inspera grading workflows support subsequent moderation.
No separate scheduling system. No video-conferencing platform bolted onto an assessment system. No spreadsheet holding the process together.
One assessment workflow.
Not every oral assessment needs the same level of control.
Institutions will be able to run Interactive Oral Assessment in an open environment or within Inspera Integrity Browser.
Within the secure environment, access to external websites, applications, files and generative AI can be restricted while authorised resources remain available.
That means security doesn’t have to dictate assessment design.
An oral could be completely closed, provide access to selected resources, or give the candidate their own previous assessment to discuss and defend.
The institution decides what the assessment requires.
Oral assessment doesn’t have to mean everyone being in the same place.
Interactive Oral Assessment will support remote delivery entirely within Inspera as well as face-to-face assessment where the candidate and assessor are physically together.
In both cases, the institutional workflow remains the same.
The assessment is scheduled. The conversation takes place. The session is recorded. Assessors mark using the appropriate rubric. A transcript and recording are available afterwards to authorised users.
Where assessment happens can change.
The assessment infrastructure doesn’t have to.
A traditional viva is one use case.
But oral assessment can do much more.
Interactive Oral Assessment can support scenario-based conversations, oral examinations, presentations followed by questions, project defences, competency conversations and other synchronous assessment designs.
The common thread isn’t the format.
It’s conversation.
A student has to do more than produce an answer. They have to articulate their thinking, respond, adapt and demonstrate what they understand.
That can tell us something different about learning.
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The University of Auckland (UoA) is New Zealand’s highest-ranked, largest, and pre-eminent research-led university, committed to delivering world-class education and assessment experiences for its students.
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Newcastle University, founded in 1834, is a prestigious UK Russell Group institution with campuses in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Malaysia and Singapore. It's renowned for its strengths in health, data, creative arts, and sustainable solutions.
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The University of London is a federation of 17 higher education institutions with a global reach and one of the largest student bodies in the world. They are also one of the oldest universities in the UK.
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