HERDSA Notices 3 September 2025

* HERDSA Blog Post: Six reasons we need relational pedagogies in higher education
* HERDSA Community: Comment on "Interactive Orals at Scale"
* HERD Special Issue 'Educating for Societal Transitions' – online launch Thursday 11 September, 2025
* Please fill out the Curriculum Design Pillars of Impact Survey !
* 2025 CRADLE International Symposium: Expert panel - 'Assessment design in higher ed: Changing practices for a world with AI'
* Exploring the Relationship Between SoTL and Higher Education Research: Definitions, Tensions, and Implications
* New articles in Higher Education Research and Development

To submit an announcement for this list complete the online form at http://herdsa.org.au/herdsa-notices

A full list of HERDSA Notices is online at http://www.herdsa.org.au/latest-news

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HERDSA Blog Post: Six reasons we need relational pedagogies in higher education
Sarah French & Elisa Bone, 3 September 2025

Sarah & Elisa present six compelling reasons that we need relational pedagogies in higher education.

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HERDSA Community: Comment on "Interactive Orals at Scale"
Ana Maria Ducasse, 1 September, 2025

Hola! As a Language and Culture Educator with over 25 years' experience developing tasks, rubrics as well as scheduling, interviewing, marking and providing feedback on interactive orals for multiples levels, I share your pain and joy. I have assessed for IELTS, the Spanish DELE, but mainly classroom based interactive orals. Usually I run interviews, but sometimes students enter in pairs, and speak to each other. I schedule in blocks of 4 in 40 minutes and get students to role play assessor/assessed in pairs from the group as a warm up. Students are scheduled to enter their 10 minute slot in alphabetical order. If people or trams run late there is a bit of wriggle room. In the interview room I set up CANVAS studio to record within the student's assessment task. It is the button intended for recording oral feedback. The feedback rubric also is held there to mark and comment for the student within the 10 mins. CANVAS has a high storage capacity for videos which is so much better than the old USB recorder on the table that replaced the cassette :). No shows can only take the oral with special consideration - it is an assessment like any other. They are scheduled online. On Teams it is easy to record, and the students receive a copy also. Food for thought: I would like to point anyone interested in the direction of 'the role of the interviewer in oral proficiency assessment' research it is for high-stakes English tests. It was funded by IDP / Cambridge to validate the IELTS interviews at the time. The main finding from this area of inquiry was that the student is as good as the interviewer interaction with them.

Read the original blog post at: hhttps://herdsa.org.au/herdsa-connect/interactive-orals-scale-what-happen...

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HERD Special Issue 'Educating for Societal Transitions' – online launch Thursday 11 September, 2025
Thursday, 11 September – online via Eventbrite and Zoom

Higher Education Research & Development is proud to announce the release of our second Special Issue for 2025, 'Educating for Societal Transitions', guest edited by Dr Giedre Kligyte, Dr Susanne Pratt, Dr Mieke van der Bijl-Brouwer, and Dr Alex Baumber, from the Transdisciplinary School, University of Technology Sydney, along with HERD's Professor Stephen Marshall.

Launch Details:
Date: Thursday, 11 September
Time: 17:00 AEST
Duration: 90 minutes
Zoom link: https://zoom.uts.edu.au/j/86932422971

Hear from guest editors and contributors to the special issue in this facilitated session and join in the debate and discussion via the Q&A. Breakout room topics will include:
Mutual transformation through real-world engagement,
Shifts in learning and teaching practices, and
Challenging beliefs and paradigms.

Eventbrite (free) tickets are available by registering at:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/higher-education-research-development-103...

Contact Emily Giles via herd.giles@gmail.com for more information

Further information: To read the Special Issue articles, visit: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/cher20

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Please fill out the Curriculum Design Pillars of Impact Survey !
12 September 2025

Dear Colleagues,
We are excited to invite you to contribute to a sector-wide curriculum design evaluation framework which will enable key stakeholders to assess the impact of their curriculum development activities effectively.
Thank you so much to those who have responded to this survey so far. It would be super if we could get some more responses so that we can have enough data to shape and develop a robust framework.

To this end, please complete our survey on how you evaluate the impact of your curriculum design processes at your institutions. Your input will be invaluable in shaping this framework.
This survey is a part of a QAA-funded Collaborative Evaluation research project and the survey findings will contribute to a sector-wide curriculum design evaluation framework which will enable key stakeholders to assess the impact of their curriculum development activities effectively.

Here's the survey: https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/kingston/qaa-survey closing on Friday 12th September.

For more information, please refer to the attached Information Sheet which is also embedded in the questionnaire. If you would like to participate, kindly complete the embedded consent form within the survey.

Curriculum Design and Review: Pillars of Impact Survey

Online surveys is a powerful, easy to use tool for creating online surveys. Run by Jisc, online surveys is used by over 300 different organisations in the UK...
app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Further information: https://app.onlinesurveys.jisc.ac.uk/s/kingston/qaa-survey

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2025 CRADLE International Symposium: Expert panel - 'Assessment design in higher ed: Changing practices for a world with AI'
Wednesday 17 September - 2.30 pm - 4.00 pm (AEST)

This year’s CRADLE International Symposium - ‘Assessment design in higher education: Changing practices for a world with AI’ - seeks to draw from theory and empirical research to unpack the broad range of contentions emerging about AI and assessment in higher education. As a pivotal highlight of the Symposium program we are pleased to invite you to an interactive public panel event.

Designing university assessment to account for the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has proved to be difficult and contentious. Across the globe, many academics are making claims that assessment designs and systems need to be completely reconsidered. But the fundamentals of assessment in terms of its purposes may still hold true and many of the problems that are faced in implementing new regimes are challenges that already existed. So what, if anything, has changed? What are the tensions that continue to bedevil us? What conceptual or theoretical framings help us make sense of the things that change and the things that stay the same?

Facilitated by CRADLE’s Professor Phillip Dawson, this panel discussion will feature a national and international cast of eminent higher education assessment researchers. The panel will reflect on the discussions held throughout the symposium and offer potential directions for future research in the intersections between university assessment and AI.

Panellists
• Professor Jason Lodge, Director of the Learning, Instruction, and Technology Lab and Professor of Educational Psychology, School of Education, The University of Queensland
• Assistant Professor Jiahui (Jess) Luo, Faculty of Education and Human Development, the Education University of Hong Kong
• Professor Jan McArthur, Professor in Higher Education and Social Justice and Head of Department in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University
• Associate Professor Nicole Pepperell, Teaching & Curriculum Team (TACT), Education Portfolio, University of Technology Sydney

Join us in person at Deakin Downtown or online for the second seminar in CRADLE's New Directions in AI Research and Practice series.

Further information: https://assessment-design-in-higher-ed-changing-practices-ai.eventbrite....

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Exploring the Relationship Between SoTL and Higher Education Research: Definitions, Tensions, and Implications
3 October 2025, 8:30am-10am ACST

Online Panel Discussion: Exploring the Relationship Between SoTL and Higher Education Research: Definitions, Tensions, and Implications

Are Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) and Higher Education research synonymous, overlapping, or fundamentally distinct? What misconceptions persist about their relationship, and how might these shape practice and policy?

Hosted by UniSA’s Higher Education Research Network, this webinar invites a panel of experts to engage in conversation about the relationship between SoTL and Higher Education research. Using both guiding questions and open dialogue, the panel will explore a range of perspectives on how these fields are conceptualised, operationalised, and valued across different institutional contexts. Key issues include the ways Higher Education institutions define, relate, and distinguish SoTL and Higher Education research, and the implications of these positions for academic workload models, research recognition, and sector-wide priorities.

Our panelists are:
Professor Chi Baik, University of Melbourne
Professor Phillip Dawson, Deakin University
Professor Paul Hanstedt, University of Minnesota Rochester
Professor Nicolette Lee, La Trobe University

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New articles in Higher Education Research and Development

Researcher cultural capability for Indigenous research: a meta-narrative review, Naomi Fillmore, Marnee Shay, Grace Sarra & Susan Danby, https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2025.2541645

Student feedback for integrating reflection into the higher education curriculum; a cross disciplinary study, Laura Rook, Bonnie Amelia Dean, Matalena Tofa, Grant Ellmers, Suzi Villeneuve-Smith, Meredith Kennedy, Erin Twyford, Michelle J. Eady, Ashley Heath, Matt Moores & Brad Wakefield, https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2025.2548274

https://www.linkedin.com/company/herdjournal
https://bsky.app/profile/herdjournal.bsky.social

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In the spirit of reconciliation HERDSA acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australasia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their Elders past, present and emerging.

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