This paper, originally written just before the outbreak of COVID-19, will provide a review of Education 4.0 in a select range of UK and international higher education providers and offer an initial discussion of the role and importance of digital personal assistants and online and lifelong learning in delivering world-class learning and teaching. This has been validated through a literature review and four case studies using scenario-planning methodology which draw on real-world examples from the UK (University of Bath), Singapore (Nanyang Technological University) and Australia (Deakin University). What can the sector learn from these pioneers; are there opportunities still to be explored; and what impact might this have on how educators teach and deliver their curriculum in the future?

Despite compelling evidence of its potential effectiveness, uptake of self and peer assessment in higher education has been slower than expected. As with other assessment practices, self and peer assessment is ultimately enabled, or inhibited, by the actions of individual academics. This paper explores what academics see as the benefits and challenges of implementing self and peer assessment, through the analysis of interviews with 13 Australian academics. Thematic analysis of our qualitative data identified seven themes of benefits and five challenges. Our academics showed strong belief in the power of self and peer assessment as formative assessment, contrary to past literature which has focussed on the accuracy of students’ marking. This paper therefore brings insights as to not only what academics value about self and peer assessment but also identifies potential inhibitors in practice. Recommendations are made about improving the design and implementation of self and peer assessment in higher education.

The term ‘peer assessment’ may apply to a range of student activities. This imprecision may impact on the uptake of peer assessment pedagogies. To better describe peer assessment approaches, typologies of peer assessment diversity were previously derived from the education literature. However, these typologies have not yet been tested with ‘real-life’ peer assessment examples, nor do they consider broader contextual matters. We present an augmented peer assessment framework, refined through analysing faculty accounts of their peer assessment practices. Our framework subsumes previous attempts to classify peer assessment, and extends them to include technology use, resources and policy, which were new features of our data not present in previous frameworks. In the current higher education climate, these considerations may be crucial for the scalability and success of peer assessment. The framework proposed in this paper provides both precision and concision for researchers and educators in studying and implementing peer assessment.

This article is a collective response to the 2020 iteration ofThe Manifesto for Teaching Online. Originally published in 2011 as 20 simple but provocative statements, the aim was, and continues to be, to critically challenge the normalization of education as techno-corporate enterprise and the failure to properly account for digital methods in teaching in Higher Education. The 2020Manifestocontinues in the same critically provocative fashion, and, as the response collected here demonstrates, its publication could not be timelier. Though theManifestowas written before the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the responses gathered here inevitably reflect on the experiences of moving to digital, distant, online teaching under unprecedented conditions. As these contributions reveal, the challenges were many and varied, ranging from the positive, breakthrough opportunities that digital learning offered to many students, including the disabled, to the problematic, such as poor digital networks and access, and simple digital poverty. Regardless of the nature of each response, taken together, what they show is thatThe Manifesto for Teaching Onlineoffers welcome insights into and practical advice on how to teach online, and creatively confront the supremacy of face-to-face teaching.

The integration of social media into higher education is having a significant impact on learning and teaching. As they become enmeshed in the fabric of academia, they are also becoming a site of contestation, especially in relation to teaching and learning. This research paper explores the key issues dominating current debates about the use of social media in higher education in Australasia. By exploring themes emerging from a debate around the use of social media in higher education in Australasia, it integrates additional comments from the collective wisdom of experienced colleagues from around the globe, as captured in the debate’s Twitter feed and live Periscope streaming. These comments highlight points of sensitivity in the adoption of social media in higher education in Australasia. This paper presents the findings and some key ideas that emerged from the debate.