Architectured Framework

Item Banks in Inspera Assessment provide customisable methods of access and metadata that meet the complex governance needs of higher education. By replacing fragmented files with an architectured framework, institutions can have access controls that match their policy, metadata for quality assurance and quality enhancement, all while safeguarding institutional intellectual property and preserving collaboration between academics and professional staff.

Three part access architecture

Inspera secures content through a three part access model. Content lives in a specific item bank. People are clustered in reusable access groups. Access groups are given specific permissions. This structure separates administrative control from content visibility. An item bank manager can govern hierarchy and structure without gaining access to the content. Reusable access groups mean that if the same group needs access to multiple item banks, you aren’t recreating the list and permissions every time, but instead applying them quickly and easily to your content.

Eliminate the security risks associated with broad, flat permission settings. Institutions can map the digital architecture directly to their hierarchy, whether operating a highly centralised examination office or a decentralised, school led model, ensuring regulatory compliance and the security of your assessment content.

Custom metadata and taxonomy

Item Bank Managers can mandate and tailor custom metadata specific to each bank from a reusable pool. Authors categorise questions against these institutionally customised metadata fields. For example, this allows you to capture programme and module learning outcomes, syllabus coverage, level of difficulty and any data meaningful to you. By deploying institutionally customised metadata fields to an item bank rather than letting authors add text to open data fields, you guard against spurious data, errors and conflicting information.

Enhance questions with searchable, auditable and reportable data. Authors can quickly and easily search through questions for reuse and editing. Question performance data feeds into our psychometrics engine and can be sliced by metadata to let you see the bigger picture and drill down into the detail. In turn institutions gain oversight for quality assurance reviews and external accreditation.

Aligned to assessments not courses

Inspera separates the assessment layer from transient content on your LMS and fragmented storage. Rather than storing content within a course page, single iterations of a module or an individual academic account, Inspera’s item banks operate on an institution, school, or programme level, as you decide. This elevates assessment questions to a repository layer matching institutional needs. Performance data lives at an item bank not course level and can be sliced by assessment delivery, metadata or both. Access is orientated around institutional need and not where, deep into an LMS or storage drive it happened to be created.

Prevent institutional knowledge loss and the high-risk ‘export-import’ cycles typical of LMSs or where content is stored on a drive. Transform fragmented, unmanaged files into long term institutional assets. At the same time, institutions reduce administrative friction, maintain integrity over your assessment questions and prevent unwanted access or exposure.

Transition from an unbanked space to item banks

Inspera facilitates a transition from unbanked content to properly governed item banks. Our Item Bank Migration Planning tool allows you to map destination banks using placeholders and identify overlapping question sets to execute bulk migration.

Derisk digital transformation using dedicated migration planning capabilities to map out future state data structures prior to execution. Inspera eliminates data duplication, prevents repository corruption, and saves post change auditing.