What does genuinely authentic assessment look like in practice – and what can higher education institutions do to design learning experiences that are equitable, integrity-rich, and meaningful for students regardless of how or where they study? Those questions ran through every contribution to the first session of Advance HE’s Elevate Australasia Spotlight Series, held on 15 April 2026 and hosted by Dr Amy McHugh and Dr Elliott Spaeth.

Three practitioners from across the Australian higher education sector shared case studies grounded in their own disciplines, each arriving at a similar conclusion: that designing assessment around authentic professional practice – rather than around institutional convenience – tends to resolve many of the problems institutions are currently trying to solve separately.

Getting hands dirty: field-based assessment in civil and environmental engineering

Associate Professor Kazem Ghabraie from Deakin University opened by describing a deceptively simple assessment he developed for a second-year field investigation unit – one that has since become one of the most effective tools in his programme.

The unit serves both campus and online students, with the online cohort making up roughly 20% of enrolments. The structural challenge was a familiar one: online students complete their practicals in intensive mode midway through the trimester, creating a significant gap between theory and hands-on practice – both in time and in sensory experience. Soil mechanics, Ghabraie explained, requires students to feel properties like plasticity, not merely to read about them.

His response was to step back from the controlled laboratory environment entirely and ask what actually happens in the field. The answer – that field investigation begins with site visits, sampling, and classification that require nothing more than soil and a bottle of water – led him to develop a field classification task in which students collect and classify five soil samples from wherever they happen to be. The assessment asks for photographic evidence and a written account of their reasoning process, assessed against engineering judgment rather than correct outcomes alone.

Running since 2019, the task has achieved submission rates consistently above 90%, and in over 700 submissions has produced just one case of academic misconduct – a student who used images sourced from the internet that were straightforward to identify. The assessment also proved unexpectedly resilient during the Covid-19 lockdowns in Victoria, when it was among the very few practical tasks in the entire civil engineering programme that students could still complete from home.

Ghabraie’s reflection was characteristic of all three presentations: “When we design assessment around authentic practices, it usually allows automatically for inclusion, integrity, and meaningful learning. They come together and reinforce each other.”

A virtual hospital of 200 patients: AI-powered simulation in pharmacy education

Dr Susan Hall, Senior Lecturer in Pharmacy and Medical Sciences at Griffith University, addressed one of the most pressing challenges in health professional education: how to give students repeated, scalable access to authentic clinical interactions when real simulated patients are expensive, time-limited, and logistically complex.

Her answer – a suite of AI-powered virtual simulated patients – has grown to 200 individual characters, each with their own medical history, personality, and communication style. They inhabit a virtual hospital where students can move between wards and interact with different patients, practising the clinical reasoning and person-centred communication skills they will need from day one of practice. Some patients are forthcoming; others are evasive. One, Hall noted, has a habit of redirecting every consultation towards her cat.

The patients were built using ChatGPT, selected for its ability to support verbal as well as written interaction – a feature Hall regards as essential for authentic clinical training. Avatars were created using Metahuman Creator, a free Unreal Engine tool that produces lifelike representations in around five minutes per patient. Crucially, the entire development process is now governed by a set of step-by-step guidelines Hall and her collaborators – academics, clinical pharmacists, and students – have produced to help other educators build their own virtual patients safely and ethically.

The creation time for a single patient has fallen from around 12 hours using early chatbot technology to between five and ten minutes using the current protocol, which includes a standard battery of 20 test questions run at intervals over a two-week period to check for hallucination and behavioural consistency. The guidelines, which cover patient demographics, medical history, medications, lifestyle factors, and guardrail prompts, are currently under review for publication.

Hall was clear that the educational value lies not in the technology but in the design: “It’s not the technology that is the educational value – it’s the design of the activity.” She also made the case that the model is transferable well beyond pharmacy, with the same principles applicable across health disciplines and potentially across universities more broadly.

EduOps: applying DevOps principles to course redesign at scale

Dr May Lim, a Nexus Fellow in the School of Chemical Engineering at UNSW, brought a systems-level perspective to the challenge of course development – asking not how an individual academic might improve a single unit, but how large institutions can uplift many courses simultaneously while teaching continues uninterrupted.

Her starting point was the software development concept of DevOps – the practice of developing and operating software systems in parallel – and the question of whether its principles could be applied to education development. The resulting ‘EduOps’ model moves through four stages – Discover, Dialogue, Design, and Develop – and draws on AI tools at each stage to accelerate work that would otherwise take months.

In the Discover phase, AI is used to analyse course documentation, assessment guides, student evaluation data, and governance materials – producing rapid diagnostics that would take a human developer far longer to compile. In the case study Lim presented, a battery engineering unit at UNSW, this analysis quickly identified a poorly structured assessment regime that was confusing students. The Dialogue phase, supported by AI-generated summaries of conversations with course conveners, surfaced the constraints and concerns that academics actually needed addressed – not just the pedagogical ideal.

Design interventions followed: a literature review with peer review component, assessed with AI assistance, replaced a vulnerable video assessment, and a role-play exercise requiring students to solve a real engineering problem within a set time became the new high-stakes assessment. AI tools then helped to auto-map course learning outcomes to rubric dimensions and generate media-rich playbooks and assessor training materials – resources that would previously have taken weeks to produce.

Lim was candid about the human dimension of this work. Much of what educational developers actually do, she observed, is “psychological development operation” – persuading colleagues that changing their assessment will not damage them or their students. Having concrete, AI-generated examples to show rather than abstract descriptions to explain makes those conversations move faster and further.

Her broader message was that institutions need a formal process for change – not just the aspiration for it. “Most institutions have no process for change,” she said. “And without that process, nothing happens.”

Reflecting on a session defined throughout by generosity and practical insight, Dr Elliott Spaeth offered his thanks to all three speakers and to colleagues who joined from across the region.

“What struck me most today was how much strong practice is already happening across Australasia, and how useful it is to make space to share that openly. Kazem showed how assessment rooted in real professional practice can help us think differently about both equity and integrity. Susan highlighted what becomes possible when pedagogical design is approached carefully and ethically, particularly in relation to access and inclusion in clinical learning. And May’s contribution was a reminder that change at scale needs more than good intentions. It needs a process, and it needs people to keep moving it forward. Thank you to our speakers, and to everyone who joined us today.”

A recording of this session is available to watch on YouTube: Elevate Australasia Spotlight Series 1 – 15 April 2026