Interview by Liana Jacinta, APAN
As Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) continues to build bridges between research, education, and industry, we are proud to spotlight our first industry member: Inspera – a global leader in digital assessment.
We sat down with Kim James Waldgrave, Head of Inspera Asia and MENAT, to learn more about the company’s mission, their reasons for joining APAN, and the exciting future of collaboration between academia and industry.
Liana: Kim, thank you for joining us. Let’s start with an introduction. Could you tell us more about Inspera?
Kim: Inspera offers a comprehensive digital assessment ecosystem for educational institutions worldwide. Our customers range from government bodies and awarding organizations to K-12 school districts and higher education, individually procured or through NREN-based framework agreements.
While these institutions can be very different in their day-to-day operations, they all rely on high-stakes digital assessments at scale as an essential business component, and trust Inspera to support them in upholding their quality standards for every assessment and submission.
Founded in Oslo in 1999, Inspera now operates globally with offices in Europe, the US, Malaysia, and Australia, supporting end-users in over 160 countries.
Our end-to-end solutions cover every stage of the assessment journey:
- Authoring (creating assessments)
- Designing (crafting experiences)
- Delivering (seamless administration)
- Monitoring (real-time tracking)
- Grading (accurate evaluation)
We also offer a suite of flexible proctoring solutions—AI and machine learning, or live—integrated with our assessment solution or with the institutional or NREN LMS. Post-assessment, Inspera Originality supports academic integrity with multilingual similarity checks and AI authorship detection.
Liana: That’s very inspiring. What motivated Inspera to become an APAN Industrial Member?
Kim: Joining APAN is a strategic decision to support our long-term organizational ambitions, both in terms of how we partner even more closely with the NREN community and in terms of the impact we wish to have on the future direction of digitisation of higher education globally.
At Inspera, we believe technology should empower both educators and learners. Enabling pedagogy through technology is one of our core principles, and being an APAN Industry Member allows us to advance this mission in a collaborative environment, alongside the very institutions we aim to serve.
We see this as an opportunity not only to contribute our extensive experience in digitizing and optimizing assessment- and academic integrity practices for educational institutions and NRENs but also to learn, co-create, and innovate in partnership with some of the region’s most experienced professionals in the NREN and higher education community.
Liana: What can Inspera offer to the APAN community?
Kim: Great question. From our 25+ years of experience in digitising assessment, we’ve learned a thing or two about how educational institutions can benefit from a digital-first assessment approach and why the NREN community can do the same.
We can offer the members unique insight into how technology can enable pedagogy today, and even more importantly, how we can help ensure it will do the same tomorrow.
Liana: Collaboration is a key value at APAN. How do you envision Inspera collaborating with the APAN community?
Kim: Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. At APAN events, we’ve already seen how vibrant and open the community is.
We look forward to engaging in knowledge-sharing forums, capacity-building workshops, forming working groups, and eventually working with APAN and the individual NRENs on pilot projects.
We’d also like to engage the membership, and at some point other industry members, in addressing shared global challenges within education, whether it’s scaling assessments across borders or meeting the need for, and mitigating the challenge of, the use of generative AI.
Liana: And finally, why do you think this collaboration is important?
Kim: Education is changing fast. The future of learning is digital, personalized, flexible, and interconnected. To prepare the next generation for this reality, we need strong partnerships that bridge the gap between industry and academia and between pedagogy, technology, and policy.
By working together as partners under the umbrella of Education rather than as traditional vendors and institutions, we can drive innovation and ensure that it is ethical, inclusive, future-proof, and sustainable.
Looking Ahead
Inspera’s entry into the APAN family marks an exciting chapter for both sides. With shared values around equity, innovation, and collaboration, the potential for impact is immense. We look forward to the journey ahead and the new possibilities it brings for digital assessment and academic integrity initiatives in the Asia-Pacific region.
Connect with Kim
To continue the conversation on digital transformation in education and explore collaboration opportunities, you can connect with Kim James Waldgrave on LinkedIn.
Kim regularly shares insights on assessment innovation, education technology trends, and the evolving landscape of learning in Asia and the Middle East. Whether you’re an educator, policymaker, or fellow industry partner, he welcomes dialogue that drives positive change.
Stay connected with Inspera via www.inspera.com
