Call for Participation: HEAd'25 Workshop: Authentic Assessment in the ‘Age of AI’: Designing Interactive Orals for Higher Education (17th June 2025)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents perhaps the most significant contemporary challenge to emerge in education within the last five years (UNESCO, 2024). AI offers considerable potential to enhance learning, teaching and assessment, through the educationally-sound use of powerful applications.

However, while AI is opening up new horizons for education, it is also raising salient questions about the ethics and place of educational technology today. Furthermore, in this apparent, ‘Age of Artificiality’, how can we preserve, promote and celebrate authentic learning and understanding? Interactive Orals (IOs) have emerged to address the imperative for authenticity, representing an innovative, creative and dialogic approach to assessment, in response to the emerging ‘Age of AI’. IOs engage learners in real-world scenario discussions that enable them to demonstrate the learning they have achieved through deep and meaningful engagement with their discipline (Pearce & Chiavaroli, 2020; Sotiriadou et al., 2020; Ward et al., 2023).

This workshop will convene HEAd scholars who are interested in the effective educational design of Interactive Orals, and how IOs can be conceptualised and deployed to promote authenticity in assessment.

As well as exemplifying and sharing best practices in the design and use of IOs for assessment in higher education, this HEAd’25 workshop will also explore the appropriate use of Artificial Intelligence within IOs. An important design challenge at the heart of the workshop will be to explore if/how AI can be judiciously used in higher education assessment to support and promote authenticity.