IRIS Hints and Tips

IRIS update August 2021

Please see below the August updates for IRIS, if you have any further questions or require any support please contact your customer support officer who will be able to help you.

Learner documents

When uploading videos the Learner Documents section now has a progress bar so you can now see when something has uploaded correctly.

Learner emails

From 29^th September email addresses for candidates will be mandatory. When registering a candidate you will have to put in an email address to be able to add them to a booking form.

Session date changes

We appreciate sometimes it can’t be helped if a session date needs to be changed however, from September there will be a potential admin fee of £25 should the session need to be changed for reasons other than medical or bereavement purposes.

Reasonable adjustments

To request a reasonable adjustment, you must use the ‘Reasonable Adjustment’ section of the booking form, not ‘other requests’, this is so that our team know you are requesting a reasonable adjustment and can review it. A how-to guide of how to request a RA is available with the documents section of IRIS. If you don’t request a reasonable adjustment using the correct process, your reasonable adjustment may not be processed, and candidates may not get the required adjustment.

See below previous updates

How to guides

Update versions of all the 'how to guides' for using IRIS have now been created and added to the documents section of IRIS. These included how to carry out an online assessment using the Signature Learning Hub. Search 'how to' in documents to find all of these guides.

Result Transcript

You have told us that you would like it to be easier to download all the results slips, including fails and breakdowns of marks. We have listened and I am pleased to tell you this has now been add to the system.

A how-to guide is now available to download from within IRIS in the documents section, including the breakdown for each candidate with a click of one button.

Reasonable Adjustment

To request a reasonable adjustment you must use the ‘Reasonable Adjustment’ section of the booking form, not ‘other requests’, this is so that our team know you are requesting a reasonable adjustment and can review it. A how-to guide of how to request a RA is available with the documents section of IRIS.

If you don’t request a reasonable adjustment using the correct process, your reasonable adjustment may not be processed and candidates may not get the required adjustment.

Resits

There is now a new process for booking resits within IRIS. You no longer need to click the resit button within ‘other details’.

To book a resit all you need to do is book a new session and select those candidates who are taking a resit, add a note to say this is a resit and submit it to Signature.

Any further questions please don’t hesitate to contact your customer support officer.

Internally Assessed sessions

Please find below further guidance for internally assessed sessions.

BSL101

As you know a candidate only needs to achieve one the BSL101 variants for the Level 1 Award in British Sign Language. Therefore, you need only create a session for the one variant the candidate is studying:

BSL101 – Introduction to British Sign Language
BSL101Y – Introduction to British Sign Language (Young People)
BSL101H – Introduction to British Sign Language (Health Care)
BSL101F – Introduction to British Sign Language (Frontline staff)

Once they have successfully completed all of the assessment criteria for that variant, you should log into IRIS and put in the candidates marks for that variant only.

If Signature have selected your BSL101 for External Quality Assurance purposes, we will email you to let you know what you need to do with that particular session.

BSL4

Once your candidates have achieved the internal subunits of the BSL421 and BSL422, you should log into IRIS and mark the candidate as PASS.

If Signature have selected your BSL4 session for External Quality Assurance purposes, we will email you to let you know what you need to do with that particular session.

BSL62 (6ASS1, 6ASS2 and 6ASS3)

Once your candidate has achieved the above assessments, you need to log into the session in IRIS and mark the candidate as PASS.

If Signature have selected your 6AS1, 2 and 3 internal session for External Quality Assurance purposes, we will email you to let you know what you need to do with that particular session.

WRITTEN AND BSL INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO MARK CANDIDATES FOR INTERNALLY ASSESSED SESSIONS CAN BE FOUND IN THE DOCUMENTS SECTION OF IRIS.

Pass transcript – breakdown of marks (now available)

A full results transcript including breakdown of marks is now available to download for each candidate that has passed a Signature assessment. To do this go to ‘certificates’ within a booking form and learner details and select ‘Transcript PDF’ as you have previously. You can also download the e-certificates here.

Please note: a breakdown of marks is not available for L33, L42 and L62. If you would like a breakdown for these contact our quality department.

A fail transcript is currently in development.

Under Review

Some centres may be seeing ‘under review’ when looking at the learner overview page, please ignore this and go into grading view where you will see the full results including the breakdown.

Centre details

We suggest your regularly check your centre details are correct and up to date, including contact details, website, email etc as this is the information that is taken across to the centre finder. To do this go to ‘My centre’ in the menu bar and amend any details that need changing and click save.

We’ve put together some helpful hints and tips to make sure you’re getting the most from IRIS and to help you understand how the system functions and reacts to actions you take.

Centre Records

Please make sure that all of your records within IRIS are correct, please check that we have the correct email address and contact details linked to your centre, these are what will be displayed if you advertise on the Signature website. To update these, go into ‘My Centre’ where you will see all of your details and be able to make any amendments as required.

Accounts/Finance Contacts

We have had a small number of centres who have been unable to log into the finance portal, the reason for this is that they had no account or finance contacts added to their account.

To make sure you have an accounts contact, within IRIS go into ‘Contacts’, find the person who deals with your accounts, click into their record and add the job role as ‘Accounts contact’. This will link them to your centre on the finance portal.

Session Tick box

When booking a session, you will see the question ‘Please tick this box for every qualification apart from unit 101 and 201’ with a little tick box. We need you to tick this box for every session apart from 101 and 201’s, this tells the system that we need to allocate an assessor.

If you don’t tick this box, we won’t know that this needs to be marked and it won’t be sent to an assessor, you will then not get your results on time.

Finalised Session

Once you have finished creating a session, you need to finalise the session using the blue button at the bottom. This tells the system that this assessment is going ahead and adds the assessment onto our reports to allocate topics.

If you don’t do this, you won’t appear on our reports, so we won’t allocate a topic.

Lock form (submit registrations)

Once you have added all the candidates onto a registration form you need to submit these to us using the ‘Submit Registrations’ button. This tell our system that you have added all the candidates for this cohort of learners and that you would like to start processing assessments and results. This allows us to enter the grades and produce certificates. You can check if the form is locked by looking at the ‘Booking locked for registrations’ date available in the form overview it should have turned amber.

If you don’t do this, you wont be able to book sessions and we can’t mark your assessment, so your results could be delayed.

Assessment Uploads

When uploading an assessment, the following file types are allowed by IRIS, if your videos aren’t in one of these formats you will need to convert them so that you can upload them.

• MP4
• Webm
• Mov

Once you have uploaded the assessment, you need to make sure that you click the ‘Submit Assessment for marking button’ – this tell us that you have uploaded the videos, and this is ready to be marked. This allows us to allocate an assessor to mark your assessments, if you don’t click this button we won’t know that you have uploaded your assessment to mark.

Public Comments

Within each form on IRIS you will see a ‘public comments’ tab within each section, this is the easiest way to share a question with your customer support officer. They will be notified when you make a public comment with a link to the form, saving time having to find the form where the question relates to.

Likewise, you will also be notified when your customer support officer responds to your query.

PO Number

If you require a PO for all of your assessments and aren’t being asked for this, go to ‘My Centre’ and click ‘Finance details’ – check to see if PO says ‘yes’ – if it doesn’t let us know and we can change that for you.

You will then need to enter a PO for every booking form.

My centre is not showing on the centre finder

Here are a couple of things that you can check within My Centre to make sure you are showing on the centre finder:

• The dropdown to the question ‘Do you want to advertise your centre on the Signature website’ is on yes.
• You have put your address in the question ‘Which address do you want to advertise’
• Your centre approval date hasn’t passed.
• The qualifications you are searching for aren’t suspended – within the qualification section of ‘My centre’

If you’re still not showing, please let us know and we can look into that in greater detail for you.

How to locate and find a booking

There is a number of ways to locate a booking.

Firstly, if you know what the booking reference number is, you can go to 'Assessments' and use the advanced search to type in the reference number and this should bring up the assessment booking.

If you don't know the booking reference number you can go to 'Learners' and search for one of the learners that is on the booking form. You can then click into the 'bookings' tab to show all the booking forms that this candidate is on. You then click 'details' and this will take you into the booking form. The reference can be found at the top on the page.