Professor Kevin Ashford-Rowe | Pro Vice-Chancellor, Digital Learning at QUT and Director, NextGen Learning

In this video, Professor Kevin Ashford-Rowe discusses his role as Pro Vice-Chancellor, Digital Learning at QUT, leveraging his knowledge of student success and academic professional development to explore how universities might reimagine high stakes assessment in a post-pandemic future.

Observing high-stakes assessment oftentimes at the periphery of the student learning experience, Kevin advocates for assessment to become an embedded, ongoing and enduring component of the student learning journey that is more scaffolded and developmental. Towards assessment innovation, Kevin addresses the key premise: what do educators need to see to assure them students have achieved learning outcomes and what are the mechanisms by which they might seek that evidence?

Kevin predicts that universities will increasingly look at ways to make the learning experience more authentic, and by extension, make assessment of that learning experience more authentic, and how this will dovetail into existing requests for greater industry readiness and work-integrated learning. In response to the counterreaction of reverting to more traditional, invigilated assessments in the name of accreditation, Kevin considers how we might go about changing the narrative in line with the digital economy.

Kevin also explores the importance of feedback and the challenges in delivering feedback at scale. He considers how peer assessment can help inculcate students into professional paradigms of practice, with peer feedback providing students with the tools for objective quality determination in submission of work. Finally, he considers how universities can deploy technology to act on students’ requests for better educator engagement.