ASCILITE NEWS

The Future is Connection: Collaboration, Creativity and Compassion in a Digital Society

Call for Papers Now OPEN

We invite all educators, researchers, learning designers, technologists, and practitioners engaged in digital education and innovative teaching practices to submit an abstract for ASCILITE 2026.

The ASCILITE 2026 Conference website is now live!. We encourage you to review the website for all the latest details on the program, speakers, registration, sponsorship and location information.

Earlybird Registration THIS WEEK!

ASCILITELive! May Webinar: Writing a Great ASCILITE Paper

Date: Friday 22 May
Time: from 3pm NZST, 1pm AEST, 10am AWSTThinking about submitting to the ASCILITE Conference but not sure where to begin?

Join this practical webinar designed for prospective authors and presenters. Whether you are considering a Full Paper, Concise Paper, Poster, or PechaKucha submission, this session will walk you through what reviewers are looking for and how to prepare a strong submission.

The webinar will cover:

Conference themes and sub-themes
Different submission types and what suits your work best
Review criteria and the double-blind peer review process
Common feedback from reviewers
Key dates and submission tips

Ideal for first-time submitters, ECRs, learning designers, educational developers, academic staff, and anyone wanting support to turn their practice or research into a conference submission.

In the latest ASCILITE Blog post super reviewer Richard McInnes, (Manager, Educational Design at the University of Adelaide), provides his tips and trick to writing a great paper. Read the post here.

Come along with your questions and ideas.

Register here.

Karine Cosgrove, Lisa Bugden, Amanda White
ASCILITELive! Webinar Leads

BE-SIG Webinar: Discussing the Castlereagh Statement

Date: Monday 18^th May
Time: 8am NZST, 10am AEST, 12pm AWST
The Castlereagh Statement is a bold, educator-led call to transform (Australian) education and training for the age of AI. As one of the largest discipline areas or faculties in most institutions – the ASCILITE Business Education SIG believes our educators can play a prominent role. Join us for a community conversation to explore what the Statement means for our sector – why authentic, capability-focused teaching, learning and assessment matter now more than ever, and how we might build a ground-up movement across our business schools to support the transformation that we know education needs.

We invite everyone involved in business education across the sector to join us in beginning this conversation. The Castlereagh Statement group will also be hosting webinars on 13 and 14 May sharing their call to action – details in the Bulletin’s Other News below.

Register here.

Sandy Barker, Audrea Warner, Danielle Logan-Fleming
BE-SIG Leads

TELedvisors-SIG May Webinar: Assuring Learning in the Age of AI

Date: Thursday 28 May
Time: from 2pm NZST, 11am AEST, 12pm AEDT, 9am AWSTIn this month’s TELedvisors Network webinar, we will explore responses to ensuring assurance of learning in tertiary education in the age of Generative AI

The Australian higher education sector is in the process of unprecedented transformation in response to a range of stressors, not least the juggernaut of generative AI platforms that go well beyond simple text generation to complete entire courses of study.

Third Space practitioners are at the intersection of this change, and our involvement is highly contextual, and in some cases contested, in different settings.

Join us to share and discuss your experiences as we collectively work to provide Assurance of Learning.

Among the topics for discussion:

2026 definitions of assured learning
What types of tasks do we design?
Who designs the assured task?
Who assures the task design?

We will be joined by Lenka Ucnik from TEQSA and other presenters will be confirmed shortly.

Register here.

Sandy Barker, Audrea Warner, Danielle Logan-Fleming
BE-SIG Leads

ASCILITE Spring into Excellence Research School 2026

Are you interested in educational research, scholarship of teaching and learning, or building your confidence as a researcher?

Whether you are an Early Career Researcher, a learning designer or educational developer wanting to strengthen your research capability, a practitioner curious about publishing, or an experienced researcher looking to connect and collaborate with others in the sector, the ASCILITE Research School provides a supportive and engaging environment to develop your ideas and research practice.

We are very happy to announce that the 2026 ASCILITE Spring into Excellence Research School will be held at the RMIT Melbourne campus (124 La Trobe Street, Melbourne VIC 3000).

Dates: 7–9 September 2026 (Tuesday lunchtime through to Thursday lunchtime)
Cost: $300 (members), $450 (non-members – includes 12 months membership) + GST

More information about the Research School can be found here.

Register & payments here.

Michael Cowling
Research School Lead

How do you know your digital learning is truly high quality?

TELAS helps institutions make quality visible through a supportive, evidence-informed peer review process designed specifically for higher education digital learning.

More than a compliance exercise, TELAS creates opportunities for meaningful conversations about what quality learning looks like in practice.

A TELAS review can help you:

Benchmark online and blended learning quality against sector standards
Support course and program enhancement conversations
Build evidence for institutional quality assurance and accreditation processes
Recognise and celebrate excellent practice through TELAS digital badging
Create a shared language for quality across teaching teams and institutions

TELAS can be applied at unit, course, program, or institutional level, making it suitable for both targeted reviews and large-scale quality initiatives.

Whether you are beginning a quality uplift initiative or looking to showcase existing excellence, TELAS provides a credible, collegial, and developmental pathway.

To explore how TELAS could support your context, contact us for a confidential conversation with the TELAS team.

Elaine Huber, Chris Campbell, Lisa Jacka & Lisa Budgen
TELAS Leads

OTHER NEWS

CRADLE Seminar Series: Voice-First Written Assessment – Redesigning for evidence, access, and ecological authenticity

Date: Tuesday 26 May 2026
Time: 10.30 am to 12.00 pm (AEST)
Where: Deakin Downtown (Level 12, Tower 2, 727 Collins Street, Melbourne) or online
Cost: This is a free event

In this seminar, the University of Oxford’s Kelly Webb-Davies will outline Voice-First Written Assessment – a two-stage assessment model designed in response to the evidentiary crisis that generative AI poses for educators assessing students’ ideation and reasoning.

Institutional responses to generative AI in written assessment have often framed it as a problem of authorship. This seminar argues it is more fundamentally a problem of construct representation and linguistic access: even before generative AI, requiring performance in prestige academic prose risked distorting or suppressing students’ best thinking, and as a result undermining valid inference about disciplinary reasoning. Now that fluent prose can be generated completely independently of a student’s ideational labour, the already unstable link between polished prose and the thinking it was assumed to represent has been entirely severed. Detector-led and disclosure-based responses cannot repair this evidentiary chain.

Voice-First Written Assessment (VFWA) is a response to this evidentiary crisis. It is a two-stage assessment model that reconfigures where and how construct-relevant evidence is secured and interpreted. Stage 1 is ungraded and produced under observed conditions, establishing an authenticated baseline of ideation. Student choice of linguistic repertoire or modality provides a more interpretable representation of students’ reasoning. Stage 2 permits unrestricted, optional digital tool use reflecting contemporary writing conditions, and enables linguistically and cognitively accessible methods to refine written work.

Register here.

TEFA May Webinar: Shaping Teaching Quality in Australian Higher Education

Date: Friday May 15
Time:12- 1.30 PM AEST

At a time of significant sector focus on teaching quality, we invite you to join the TEFA Network for a national conversation on teaching quality with Professor Liz Johnson. This session offers a valuable opportunity to engage directly with work informing ATEC and to contribute your perspective to the discussion.

The session will feature a short presentation followed by facilitated discussion and community Q&A.

Designed to be interactive, participants will be invited to share insights from their own contexts and contribute to shaping how teaching quality is understood and advanced across the sector.

Join in for a collaborative conversation that brings Education Focused academics together to connect, share perspectives, and help inform future practice.

Sign up here.

More information is available here.

Castlereagh Statement – May 2026 information webinars

How can education and training adapt to better serve students of today and tomorrow? Are we valuing and incentivising the right things, and aligning with business and industry on what they need? What is the collective way forward?

Together with Katie Ford, Jason M. Lodge, and many others, you are invited to join this national webinar around the Castlereagh Statement on Wed 13 and Thu 14 May. You will hear from people from K-12, VET, higher education, and industry bodies who are leading the charge in their own spheres to move the conversation towards action. Find out how you can get involved as well, and what you can do in your own context.

Download the Statement here.

Centre for the Study of Higher Education (UniMelb) Symposium: Cognitive Offloading or Effective Practice? Exploring the Future of Learning with GenAI

Date: Wednesday 3rd June 2026

As generative AI tools become embedded in everyday academic practice, they are reshaping how students learn, communicate, problem-solve and think. From drafting essays to summarising readings and generating code, generative AI systems increasingly take on cognitive tasks that were once central to the learning process.

This symposium, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE), will explore the implications of cognitive offloading for higher education. When students outsource aspects of thinking to AI, what happens to learning, understanding, and intellectual development? What tasks or activities are ok to cognitively offload, and how might reliance on AI tools reshape critical thinking, creativity, memory, and disciplinary expertise?

Bringing together scholars, educators and sector leaders, the event will explore:

The opportunities and risks of AI-assisted study,
Implications for assessment design and academic standards,
The implications for professional practice and lifelong learning.

Join for a timely and thought-provoking discussion on how higher education can navigate — and shape — the evolving relationship between human cognition and artificial intelligence.

More information available here.