We credential them, but we've never met them. What online education must confront
Mollie Dollinger, Curtin University
Fully online education is central to how the Australian higher education sector operates. It supports the sector’s growth, but it does something more important too: it opens doors for students who would otherwise struggle to access higher education.
Regional and rural students, those with disabilities or caring responsibilities, mature-age and part-time learners – these are the groups that rely most on online learning. These are also exactly the groups that the Australian Universities Accord identifies as priorities if we are to meet the goal of participation parity by 2050.
Simply put, safeguarding the quality of fully online programs should be a sector imperative.
Because while assuring learning has become harder across all programs, for fully online degrees, the difficulty is acute. Students may complete their entire qualification without ever setting foot on campus. Educators may never physically meet the students they assess. That raises significant questions about how educators assess and judge students’ achievement of the learning goals and how institutions warrant that graduates have achieved the intended learning outcomes.
That concern led me to invite some of the sector’s best minds in assessment design, academic integrity, quality assurance, and online education to Sydney about a month ago. Over two days, we worked through the problem together, and the result is a new briefing paper: Assurance of Learning in Fully Online Credentialled Programs.
This paper tackles three key questions for assuring learning in fully online programs. First, what are the dimensions of the assurance of learning? Yes, one of these is robust secure assessment practices, but that alone isn’t sufficient. Assurance also requires a culture of academic integrity and valid and trustworthy assessment design, which enables educators to draw the most valid inferences possible.
Then we highlight three possible models for online programs to consider towards strengthening their assurance of learning. Two of these bring back in-person elements, either through supervised assessments at approved locations or accredited workplace supervision and assessments.
But the last one, longitudinal synchronous learning partnerships, retains a fully online mode. The caveat? It still requires synchronous interaction. Because it’s this element of the learning experience – a genuine, real-time dialogue between a student and educator – that not only provides security (authentication and control of circumstances) but builds defensible evidence that the student has truly demonstrated the learning outcomes.
The takeaway from the work is we need to stop pursuing perfection or absolutes when it comes to assessment design and start having frank and honest discussions about what assessment really is: a principled act of inference that is fallible, improvable, context-dependent, and fundamentally human.
That means having the conversations we need to have among course and program coordinators, educators, and those operating at senior and strategic levels of university operations about the amount of risk we are willing to carry. Fully online programs that are fully asynchronous, with siloed units and assessments that do not demonstrate progression, and discrete invigilated online examinations as the sole mechanism for verifying learning are very high risk.
Meanwhile, fully online programs that have a combination of asynchronous and synchronous elements as mandatory, that offer interconnected and scaffolded curriculum and assessment, and that use one of the verification modes we propose, lower the heat.
Because, at the end of the day, assurance is a patchwork of various measures and interventions that provide us, as educators or institutions, with sufficient confidence to make defensible judgements. And the question those delivering fully online programs need to ask: is how sure are we that the student has genuinely achieved the learning outcomes?
Online education exists largely because it serves students who cannot access traditional modes of instruction. If we fail to assure its quality, we fail the students who need it most. The sector has a window to get this right, and the frameworks are now here.
Professor Mollie Dollinger is Director of Assessment 2030 in the Office of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Curtin University