Assurance of learning and public trust
In this Q&A, OES’s Director of Government Relations, Rebecca Hall, speaks with higher education sector expert and policy advisor, Chris Gartner, about assurance of learning as a public trust issue, Australia’s regulatory foundations, and how the Connected Assurance Framework can help create a common language across a complex system.
Assurance of learning is often discussed in technical terms – assessment design, detection tools and teaching models.
But beneath that sits a bigger question: can society still trust that a qualification genuinely represents what a graduate knows and can do?
In an AI-enabled environment, assurance of learning is becoming increasingly connected to questions of institutional legitimacy, public confidence and long-term trust in higher education itself.
In this discussion, Rebecca and Chris explain why credible assurance depends on:
- maintaining public trust in higher education qualifications and institutions
- creating common language and shared frameworks across the sector
- balancing equity, quality and access in AI-enabled learning environments
- keeping student voice and experience central to assurance conversations.
Q&A between Rebecca Hall and Chris Gartner
This Q&A was captured as part of an interview for OES’s The Thought Bubble podcast, where in season 2 the OES team unpack what it means to assure learning outcomes in higher education.
“This is a pivotal moment for legitimacy.”
Q: Chris, why does this moment matter so much for assurance of learning? What’s at stake if we get the response wrong?
Chris: I think this is a moment to lift our eyes up and not just look down at questions of assessment and teaching and learning. It’s a pretty pivotal moment for the higher education sector.
More broadly, people are questioning its legitimacy and whether it can continue to do what it has done for years and years, even centuries.
If we don’t get it right – if we don’t reconfirm with society, with the community, with government, with industry that higher education and education more broadly can still be trusted to be the custodians of high-quality learning, high-quality teaching, and most importantly assuring people that what is being taught is being received – then we’ve lost the mantle… then, we’ve lost the nub of why people look to higher education as a trusted set of institutions.
Teaching and learning is at the very core of higher education, and assurance of learning is at the very core of that whole process.
So, if we don’t get it right, the legitimacy and trust that society has is questioned.
AI is changing the game, but it’s not changing the issues. It’s deepening them and shining a spotlight on them. The risk is that we in the sector focus too much on the nitty-gritty and lose sight of the higher-level questions society is asking of us now.
“Australia has real regulatory infrastructure – and a perception risk.”
Q: How is Australia doing on assurance of learning, beyond the headlines?
Rebecca: This isn’t just an Australian issue, but our regulatory settings are distinctive. How do you think we’re doing here?
Chris: Some might say I’m biased, because I’ve been part of higher education policy and regulation for a while now, but I think Australia starts from a strong position.
We have a national regulator and national standards that, if we go back 15 or so years, universities might not have appreciated at the time. But the dividends are now being paid. We have real infrastructure – people and institutions whose job is to question, to uphold quality standards and to do so sector-wide, not just campus by campus.
That’s an Australian innovation, and it’s now kicking in. We have a regulator asking hard questions of institutions, which puts us in a different position to some systems we’re compared with.
The second point is that because we’re all being asked these questions, and because we’re a diverse sector that encourages diverse ideas, we’re at an inflection point. That diversity of thought is generating a lot of chatter and argument about the way forward.
That’s a strength internally, but for the “punter” looking at universities from the outside, that chatter and lack of a clear, sector-wide perspective is a risk. It can look like we’re arguing among ourselves and don’t know what to do, which isn’t advantageous for universities.
“We lose people when we jump straight to the technicalities.”
Q: What’s one assumption about assurance of learning the sector needs to let go of, especially if we want to balance equity, quality and scale?
Chris: At a top-line conceptual level, assurance of learning makes sense to people. An education provider says at the beginning of someone’s study: this is what you’re going to learn, these are the learning outcomes we’re going to help you achieve.
Assessment is about warranting that teaching and learning has had its effect, so the graduate walks away knowing what they’re supposed to know.
When you explain that to people on the street – I’ve had those conversations with my relatives – they get it. They’re supportive. But then we have a tendency to jump very quickly into technicalities: different modes, rationales, benefits. That’s when we lose people.
That’s when conversations default to “group work is awful, why do we do it?” or “the only way to fix this is to bring back traditional invigilated exams with a physical hall and someone walking up and down”.
We get lost in the detail around assurance and the things we do want technical experts to be talking about, but we don’t always start from first principles or bring people along.
If we don’t close that loop in our conversations with politicians, regulators, the sector and industry – if we don’t keep connecting back to that simple, shared understanding of why assurance matters – we risk looking a bit rabble-like. That perception, that we’re fragmented or can’t agree on the basics, is a real risk.
“A common framework helps align very different pressures.”
Q: OES has been piloting and testing the Connected Assurance Framework. How might that help with the pressures and binaries we’re seeing now?
Rebecca: If you were sitting in an institution right now, how could the framework be useful?
Chris: Institutions are really complex places. You’ve got university leaders, executives and governing councils under a lot of scrutiny – very focused on social license, standards, reputation and long-term sustainability. They have one set of concerns.
Then you have teaching and learning practitioners and academics at the coalface. Almost everyone wants to do a high-quality job, but they’re feeling the pressures of adapting to all this while doing what has always been a hard job: supporting students to acquire knowledge and skill. Their concerns and pressures are different from management’s.
And you have students, dipping in and out of these high-level dialogues while juggling cost-of-living pressures and asking, “If I put this time, money and effort in, will it deliver what it should – a job and a future?”
In that environment, if we let everything run without a common language, people don’t always understand each other’s pressures.
The Connected Assurance Framework OES has brought out – talking about assurance of learning as relational, technical and pedagogical in its key elements – is an attempt to bring everyone to the same concepts and the same understanding as we navigate this.
The sector and the world are being disrupted not just by AI, but by a range of factors. If we don’t pause to create a common language and framework for these conversations, things can spiral quite quickly. That’s why I think this is a useful contribution.
Rebecca: And it connects with the work that TEQSA, Australian researchers and academics have been leading – not just from a regulatory perspective, but through research, insight and institutional practice. The aim is to build on that knowledge and add a practitioner lens.
Chris: To be really clear, this is ultimately about supporting practitioners to adapt, change and strengthen their approaches. That’s what this is all about.
“Student voice can’t be an afterthought.”
Q: What do you think is at risk of being missed in current assurance of learning conversations?
Chris: There is one key group we often talk about being at the heart of everything we do: students. And sometimes, it seems that across the sector, we only mention them when we realise we’ve forgotten them… The students.
TEQSA is taking active measures to build formal mechanisms for student voice into its work and conversations about regulatory futures. In teaching and assessment conversations, we always need to make sure students’ voices are amplified and part of the mix. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but it can be forgotten.
Everything we’re talking about here ultimately focuses on students, often adult learners. They know what the pressures are – sometimes more acutely and clearly than we do as practitioners or supporters. So, I’d strongly encourage us to keep student voice in the mix.
Rebecca: Absolutely. Recent data shows around 80% of Australian higher-education learners are using AI, and close to 50% are studying online or in some form of non-campus-based mode, a figure that will only grow. The stakes are high, but we have strong foundations and staff to build something positive from this moment.
Chris: And we shouldn’t forget the school sector. These issues and transformations are being considered there too. School systems are preparing the future students of higher education.
Questions about coherence of approach – how you learn, how you’re assessed – need to stretch across sectors. Students and our colleagues in schools are people we should engage with as well.
Connected assurance and system-level trust
OES’s Connected Assurance Framework is one attempt to provide that shared language: bringing together pedagogical, relational and technological assurance so leaders, practitioners, regulators and students can talk about the same concepts when they talk about trust in learning.
For Chris, the core message is simple: if assurance of learning is at the heart of higher education’s social license, then connected, program-level assurance is part of how we sustain that license in an AI-enabled world – without narrowing access or losing sight of student experience.
Listen to The Thought Bubble podcast >
Explore Season 2 of The Thought Bubble >
Read more about OES’s Connected Assurance Framework >
