Challenging the “online vs on campus” debate and exploring how program design drives assurance.

This six-episode season of The Thought Bubble explores how higher education can credibly assure learning in an AI-enabled world. Drawing on OES’s Connected Assurance Framework, the series brings together academic leaders, learning designers and policy experts to examine how learning is designed, supported and evidenced over time. Focused on quality, equity and trust, it offers a practical, sector-facing conversation on building defensible evidence of student capability.

Episode 2 challenges one of the most persistent assumptions in higher education: that risk is tied to delivery mode.

Hosted by Amanda Ford (OES, Associate Director of GenAI), this episode features two of OES's senior leaders, Dr Aaron Wijeratne and Dr Karen Harvey, who bring perspectives from program design and student experience as well as their respective PhD research.

Together, they explore how online, hybrid and on-campus programs often share similar assessment structures, yet are judged differently based on modality labels. Quality is not tied to physical location, but to how learning is intentionally designed as a structured environment, with clear weekly touchpoints, scaffolded progression and visible evidence of learning over time.

The conversation shifts the focus from “is online safe?” to a more useful question: is this program designed and governed in a way that generates credible, connected evidence of learning?

Drawing on the OES Connected Assurance Framework, the episode highlights the role of program architecture, coherence and progression in shaping assurance, and examines how modality-based assumptions can lead to blunt or inequitable responses.

The episode also highlights how this plays out for career changers and time-poor learners, where flexibility must coexist with strong, ongoing evidence of capability.

This episode discusses the Connected Assurance Framework, which underpins the entire season. This framework is discussed in OES's positioning paper on Assurance of Learning which can be found here: https://oes.edu.au/assuranceoflearning/

Published by OES (Online Education Services) – www.oes.edu.au
Recorded in Melbourne, Australia.