As the fear of mortality struck humanity, a new age dawned in the relational styles, processes, and interactions amongst people. COVID-19 has caused a major shift in the educational landscape. While most teaching and learning activities moved online, field placement units which are fully invested in industry engagement, and once highly sought,…

Despite decades of dependence on sessional teaching staff, universities in Australia and internationally still find it difficult to support the teaching work of this large, casual workforce. A significant consequence of casually-employed teaching staff is risk; sessional academics' professional identity is compromised, quality assurance of…

Providing effective, high quality feedback that students engage with remains an important issue in higher education today, particularly in the context of academic language support where feedback helps socialise students to academic writing practices. Technology-enhanced feedback, such as audio and video feedback, is becoming more widely used, and…

Written communication skills are one of the most assessed criteria in higher education contexts, especially in humanities disciplines, including teacher education. There is a need to research and develop an assessment grading tool (i.e. criteria sheet or rubric) that would assist students in pre-service teacher education programs to better…

During early accreditation visits by the Australian Medical Council (AMC), staff in the School of Medicine (SoM) were asked to demonstrate how and when AMC student outcome statements were being integrated into the MBBS course. As a result, the School Executive committed to developing a curriculum mapping system (CMS) that could systematically…

Across the Australian Higher Education sector a focus on quality is driving a new paradigm for learning and teaching: quality standards. One challenge is to engage all academics with this progress towards systematic quality enhancement and assurance. Sessional staff, who provide most of the face-to-face teaching in Australian universities, remain…

In the era of quality assurance (QA), close scrutiny of assessment practices has been intensified worldwide across the board. However, in the Australian context, trends in QA efforts have not reached the field of modern/foreign languages. This has largely resulted in leaving the establishment of language proficiency benchmarking up to individual…

Assessment is an important element of university curricula for both teachers and students. It provides evidence that students have learned what their teachers expected them to learn. There is good evidence that teachers' use of exemplars in a dedicated marking class held before an assessment task helps students understand what is expected of them…

Benchmarking as a type of knowledge-sharing around good practice within and between institutions is increasingly common in the higher education sector. More recently, benchmarking as a process that can contribute to quality enhancement has been deployed across numerous institutions with a view to systematising frameworks to assure and enhance the…