On 5 November 2025, the HERDSA Assessment Quality Special Interest Group and ASCILITE’s Transforming Assessment community jointly hosted a thought-provoking webinar titled Reimagining Assessment in Uncertain Times: Dialogues from the UK and Australia. The session brought together two leading voices to explore how higher education can evolve assessment practices amid rapid technological changes and persistent institutional inertia towards meaningful assessment systems.

Professor David Tree, Vice Dean (Education) and Professor of Life Sciences Education at Brunel University London, opened with a compelling case for integrated and synoptic assessment. Drawing on his multi-year program reform, he demonstrated how replacing fragmented, module-by-module assessments with an integrated approach can reduce assessment overload while deepening learning intentions. By aligning assessment tasks explicitly with program-level learning outcomes, the approach minimises extraneous cognitive load, eliminates unnecessary duplication, and frees cognitive capacity for genuine capability integration. Prof Tree’s most powerful message, however, was cautionary: technical redesign alone is insufficient. Deep-rooted cultural norms, modular thinking, underlying beliefs and risk aversion,  mindset must be confronted first.

David’s Talk: https://youtu.be/ph4ppV0Nd7I

The second presentation by Professor Peter Bryant, Associate Dean (Education) and Professor in Business Education at the University of Sydney, shifted the lens to the generative AI storm now sweeping through higher education. Acknowledging the discomfort many academics feel of being caught between institutional mandates to “embrace AI”, industry pressures, vendor hype, and legitimate concerns about academic integrity, Prof Bryant described educators as inhabiting a precarious “liminal zone” or “third space”. In this unsettled territory, old certainties have dissolved but new stable practices have yet to emerge. Rather than offering quick-fix AI policies or toolkits, he issued a provocative call: return to first principles. What is learning for? What do graduates actually need to thrive in an uncertain, AI-augmented world? Only by recentering on higher education’s core mission of meaningful learning, critical thinking, ethical judgment, , and the ability to navigate ambiguity can we design assessments that are future-resilient rather than merely AI-resistant.

Peter’s Talk https://youtu.be/ifUjQfY7l_M

Together, the two presentations built powerfully on earlier HERDSA–ASCILITE conversations about programmatic and program-level assessment, weaving together long-standing concerns about modular fragmentation with the urgent new realities of Gen AI.

The webinar concluded with a lively and practical Q&A in which participants explored actionable strategies for designing coherent, meaningful assessment systems while fully acknowledging the discomfort of the “liminal zone” most educators currently occupy amid the AI disruption.