by Jocasta Williams
It’s fairly common these days to hear people blaming generative AI for creating a crisis in assessment. Associate Professor John Mahoney sees it differently. The problems were already there; GenAI has simply exposed them – and, in doing so, has given higher education an opportunity to rethink what assessment is for and how we can genuinely assure student learning.
As Academic Lead of HELTA and ACU Thrive in the Centre for Education and Innovation at Australian Catholic University (ACU), John has been closely involved in that rethink, with assurance of learning becoming an increasingly important part of the university’s approach to assessment. “What we’re really assuring is that our graduates can be confident in what they know and what they can do – and that the societies they’re entering can be confident in the knowledge, skills and attributes they bring with them,” John explains. “That’s our responsibility as a university.”
That doesn’t mean every assessment needs to exclude generative AI. ACU’s approach creates space for students to use AI to experiment, innovate and extend their learning, while identifying other points in the curriculum where the university needs to confidently assure what an individual student knows and can do without relying on GenAI. Increasingly, that means creating opportunities to see students demonstrate what they know and can do, rather than simply assessing what they produce.
Supervised exams remain one way of assuring learning, but they’re far from the only one. Across ACU, interactive tasks are creating opportunities for students to demonstrate knowledge and skills through human interaction: interactive orals, viva voces and oral defences, as well as discipline-specific activities such as moots, simulations and role plays. In the exercise science and exercise physiology subjects John teaches, that interaction is itself part of what students need to learn. His students are developing interpersonal communication skills they’ll eventually use with clients from different backgrounds and with different health conditions. They need to listen actively, ask meaningful questions, build rapport and respond appropriately to the person sitting in front of them. An interactive assessment allows John to see those skills in action rather than asking students to describe what they would do.
For six or seven years, John and his colleagues had been using an interactive role play as part of their assessment design. They were confident in the task and what it allowed students to demonstrate, but there were still two important gaps they hadn’t been able to solve: feedback and consensus moderation. ACU delivers the same unit across multiple campuses, meaning different educators are assessing students against the same expectations in different locations. When a student responds to a spontaneous interactive task in an unexpected way, educators need to be confident that colleagues elsewhere would make a similar judgement. At the same time, providing useful feedback on a live performance was difficult once that moment had passed.
EchoReflect gave the team a way to address both gaps without changing an assessment they (and their students) already valued. Recording each interaction meant educators could provide feedback against specific moments in a student’s performance, while also sharing those same examples with colleagues across campuses to compare judgements and build greater consensus around marking.
Solving those immediate challenges also gave John and his colleagues an opportunity to think more deeply about the role feedback could play in the learning process.
For John, the purpose of feedback is fundamentally about progression. “What does a student currently know? What do we want them to know? What can they currently do, and what do we want them to be able to do?” he explains. “One of the purposes and the values behind feedback is to take students to the next level of learning.”
That principle is relatively straightforward to enact in a written assignment. An educator can place a comment beside a sentence or paragraph, giving students a clear connection between what they produced and the feedback they received. Interactive tasks make that much harder. Once a role play, oral defence or simulation is over, feedback can easily become a few comments delivered at the end – detached from the exact moment they refer to and difficult for students to revisit later. For John, that meant an otherwise strong assessment wasn’t delivering the kind of feedback he and his students wanted.
Recording those interactions with EchoReflect changed the relationship. Feedback could be connected directly to the student’s performance, allowing educators to identify something done particularly well, highlight a missed opportunity or provide an example of how a skill might be developed further.
That matters because John’s assessments aren’t isolated events. Students complete three increasingly complex interpersonal communication tasks, building from foundational skills towards a challenging interaction involving the triage of an undiagnosed mental health condition. Feedback from the first assessment therefore has a job to do in the second, and feedback from the second needs to help prepare students for the third. Students themselves began making those connections, talking about what they had learned from an earlier assessment and what they were taking forward into the next. Feedback was no longer simply an explanation of a completed task; it became part of the scaffolding between one stage of learning and the next.
John describes this as authentic feedback – an important counterpart to the sector’s growing focus on authentic assessment. If the assessment asks students to demonstrate a real skill in a realistic interaction, the feedback should be equally connected to what actually happened.
Introducing technology into a live, human interaction might seem like it would create distance between educator and student. In John’s experience, it did the opposite. Because the interaction had been recorded, educator and student could sit down together later and look at exactly what had happened. A student might be convinced they had handled a particular moment well, only to notice something different when watching it back. At other times, students hadn’t recognised something they had done particularly well until John was able to show them.
Those moments changed the conversation. Instead of an educator saying, “I’m pretty sure you did this”, and a student remembering it differently, both could work from the same experience. They could pause at a particular moment, connect it to the feedback that had been provided and talk about what the student might do differently next time.
This was an unexpected benefit – the technology hadn’t replaced the human connection at the heart of the assessment, it had created more opportunities for it. Feedback became something educators and students could work through together, creating opportunities for much more meaningful conversations about the student’s learning and development.
It also changed what reflection could look like. Students don’t always perceive their own performance accurately in the moment. Watching themselves back can reinforce strengths they hadn’t recognised, while also making areas for development much clearer. Coupled with the feedback given at the time, the recording creates a more reliable starting point for the student to decide what they need to practise next. Reflection, in that sense, isn’t simply looking backwards. It becomes preparation for what comes next.
That reflection goes beyond asking students what they need to do differently in their next assessment. It also creates an opportunity for them to think about how they’re learning, how they’re developing and, ultimately, the kind of professional – and person – they want to become. That matters because the skills being developed through these interactive tasks aren’t simply assessment skills. Active listening, asking meaningful questions, taking another person’s perspective and building genuine human connection are all things John’s students will need when they graduate into professions where they’ll work closely with others. Good assessment design gives educators an opportunity not only to assure those capabilities, but to help students recognise and develop them along the way.
A recent conversation with a colleague gave John a particularly powerful way of thinking about the kind of people ACU hopes those students will become. Many will enter professions where they will care for other people – patients, clients, students and communities. But ACU also wants them to be caring people: people who listen genuinely, seek to understand another perspective and bring humility and empathy to the way they interact with others.
That broadens the possibilities of what assessment can achieve. Interactive tasks can help ACU assure the knowledge and skills its graduates need, while also creating opportunities for students to practise, recognise and reflect on the qualities that will shape how they use those capabilities in the world.
The experience has also changed the way John thinks about his own role as an educator.
After more than 20 years of teaching, John says one of the most significant outcomes was feeling that EchoReflect had made him a better educator. With fewer practical barriers around feedback and moderation, he could focus more of his time and attention on being present with students, experiencing their learning and having meaningful conversations about where they wanted to go next.
Perhaps that brings the story back to the opportunity John sees in the current rethink of assessment. Assurance of learning may begin with being able to stand behind what graduates know and can do, but good assessment can achieve much more: helping students understand how they’re developing, connect meaningfully with the people around them and reflect on who they want to become. GenAI may have exposed some persistent problems in assessment – the opportunity now is to use that moment to build something better.
Echo360 is the global edtech leader enabling transformative learning experiences for education and business through the AI-powered Echosystem: the world’s first and only Learning Transformation Platform (LTP) that delivers dynamic creation, engagement, and assessment of education and training at scale worldwide. With innovative authoring (EchoInk), video (EchoVideo), engagement (EchoEngage), assessment (EchoExam), and video-based skills practice and feedback (EchoReflect), the Echosystem is an interoperable, modular platform.
