This week I had the privilege of attending the national Higher Education Authority Open Education conference, hosted down the road from me at the MTU Bishopstown campus, Cork. When registering a few weeks ago I knew this would be a busy week trying to wrap up grading but it was too good an opportunity to miss out on and so I rescheduled my week to fit the event in. I am so glad that I did.
For context, I have, for many years considered myself an open practitioner, making sure that any research I am working on is published with open access, and sharing my teaching practices openly with anyone interested. In current times, use of generative AI (GenAI) in teaching and learning practice is quite topical and I realise that I have not written explicitly about my experiences in my teaching practice reflections. Note to self to reflect more openly on this topic going forward. In my defence, the past two academic years have busy with engaging students as partners in an assessment co-design project, and working on a subsequent paper that was recently published, with open access of course (see Flynn & Gatrell, 2026)!
Recently, I have been engaging more in the scholarship of teaching and learning (widely referred to as SoTL), trying to understand how my teaching practices might be shared with, and how I can learn from, SoTL peers and others. Research papers are one way and there are a couple of other SoTL communities that I try to engage with when time allows (my report card would say: must try harder). After all, learning with and from one another on the lifelong learning journey surely counts as scholarship?
Anyway, back to this week’s event, suitably titled Open Education: Supporting Policy and Practice, an opportunity to listen, to take stock, and to notice what continues to surface in my own thinking about teaching and learning. Among the keynotes, workshops, and informal conversations, I found myself returning to questions that sit at the centre of my current research and practice: How do we design assessment that matters? What does it mean to genuinely work with students as partners? And what practical and ethical commitments are required if we are to take openness seriously?
For me, these questions are at the forefront of authentic assessment, asking students to do something meaningful, to produce work that resonates beyond the immediate context of the module, and to engage with the kinds of ambiguity they will encounter outside the classroom in their future careers.
Openness and authenticity together are concepts I need to think more about in the context of assessment. When assessment outputs are shared, reused, or designed with real audiences (or based on real projects in my discipline) in mind, thinking begins to shift from simulation to participation. Students are no longer just practicing for the real world, they are contributing to it, however modestly. This, to me, feels like a more ambitious, and more honest, interpretation of authenticity. It also raises important questions about support, equity, and consent, reminding us that openness must be thoughtfully scaffolded rather than assumed to be inherently beneficial.
An additional complexity, that is increasingly present in our day-to-day practice, is the question of openness in relation to students’ use of GenAI tools to generate assessment outputs (I’m not bothered about grammar checkers and the like (although Microsoft Word has a good editor in my view). My interest concerns what the current behaviours reveal about trust, transparency, and assessment design itself. For me, over the past couple of years, there has been a notable lack of openness in some student quarters about how and when they are using these tools, and this is perhaps not surprising. When assessment remains tightly controlled, high-stakes, and oriented toward performance, the conditions for honesty are limited. This raises important questions for those of us working in SoTL: if we are advocating for openness, co-design, and authentic engagement, are we also creating spaces where students can be open about their learning practices? Perhaps the challenge is not simply student behaviour, but the extent to which our assessment cultures invite, or discourage, transparency (and openness)?
At over 700 words it is time to close out this reflection, the first of a few more, I suspect, on this topic.
Until next time, Sandra
Featured image courtesy of geralt on Pixabay
Declaration: I dreamt up and wrote this post, Copilot suggested some polish, some of which I applied.
Reference:
Flynn, S., & Gatrell, D. (2026). Supporting postgraduate students’ engagement: an Activity Theory analysis of the impact of a co-designed assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2026.2656297
Sandra Flynn 