Ed & Tech must-reads 111125

Giving voice to women students: designing oral assessments for inclusion and validity from Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

Try as I might, it appears that this edition is going to be all AI (if sometimes indirectly) all the time. Oral assessments have emerged as one of the formats that educators feel more confident about when it comes to providing assurance of learning - by putting students on the spot to speak directly to their understanding of the work that they have done. This paper from Rae, Tai and Dawson (CRADLE, Deakin Uni) suggests that this approach may disadvantage women students as they “have greater public speaking fear, report lower levels of confidence, tend to assess themselves worse and face bias against feminised voices”. The authors identify approaches in the literature which suggest designing these tasks for greater inclusivity, spacing activities like this over the teaching period, and offering practice sessions.

Responses to Anthology (Blackboard) shrugging its shoulders about bots impersonating humans in the LMS from LinkedIn

So one of the bigger innovations in the GenAI space in the last year or so has been the rise of more complex agents capable of breaking a prompted task into component parts and engaging with different parts of the Internet to carry it out. Increasingly, this involves the bots being logged in to institutional LMS’ - which cheating aside presents significant cyber security and privacy issues. Last week Anthology made a statement along the lines of “well, we can’t tell, so what you gonna do, have you considered teaching better?” - which underwhelmed more than a few commenters in the know on LinkedIn. Ben Williamson called it infuriating and called for sector wide action, Anna Mills described these activities as fraud and a raft of other commenters shared equally strong opinions. Maybe this is what happens when your business goes bankrupt.

From polyjargon to programs: Systems thinking in assessment from Needed Now in Learning and Teaching

One of the more positive outcomes of the GenAI explosion has been the resurgence of interest in programmatic learning design - something those of us in the L&T third space have cried out for for decades but which was always just too hard for most. Diana Saragi Turnip and Priya Khanna Pathak (both UNSW) report on a recent symposium of programmatic approaches to assessment organised by HERDSA which highlighted both the value of this way of thinking and some practical next steps. They point out that it has been the norm in medical education for some times but for other discipline areas, while worthwhile, the changes won’t be easy.

2026 AI in Higher Education Symposium Australia & New Zealand - call for proposals to present (Closes 17th Nov)

The AI in HE Sympo has grown apace in recent years, probably because of its emphasis on very practical and useful examples of the use of GenAI in practice. Also because it is free. The call is currently out for people to present - if you’ve been doing something novel and useful, please consider sharing.