CRADLE Seminar Series: Are you afraid of the doubt? Educator uncertainty in fully online programsDate: Wednesday 15 July 2026
Time: from 12 noon AWST | 2.00 pm AEST | 4:00pm NZST
Where: Online
Cost: This is a free event In this seminar, Curtin University’s Professor Mollie Dollinger unpacks what educator uncertainty means for fully online programs in an age of generative AI and asks, ‘Are you afraid of the doubt?’ At many higher education institutions across Australia and globally, the response to the challenges of generative AI has been undertaken with rigour, pace, and heart. Key design features – constructive alignment, embedding secure assessments that verify students’ identity and understanding, the adoption of course-wide or programmatic approaches – have all been embraced quickly. Each of these approaches offers educators a measure of certainty: that what we outline, mark, and credential rests on solid ground. Yet education is not an undertaking one can achieve without doubt. To learn and to assess are both judgements. And while we can, and should, design for greater certainty and assurances, doubt is not a feeling we will ever evade. Nor is it one without value. To doubt is to be honest about the limitations of what we can teach, and what we can claim to know of students’ learning. The real provocation for educators is not whether we can eliminate doubt from our teaching, but whether we are willing to confront it, to speak it, and to recognise where it has a place. In no area is this more pertinent than in fully online programs, where the doubt runs sharpest. Yet these programs are also among the sector’s strongest mechanisms for equity, making tertiary education accessible to students who would otherwise have no route to it. Now is the time to get these programs right; to design them with a balance of the need for certainty and assurances, while recognising that doubt will, and always has, played a role. In this talk, then, I want to bring doubt into the light, to ask what it would mean to design in honest recognition of it. So, they ask you, are you afraid of the doubt? Join for this online-only seminar to hear more about the role of doubt in fully online education. Register here |
