Last week, Future Campus reported on comments made during a closed-door meeting, where a TEQSA representative prompted the educational leaders gathered in the room to reflect on the future of fully online degrees in their current form – specifically regarding their ability to assure the learning of students that no one from their institutions had ever met in person. The leaked remarks sparked an immediate reaction both on social media and in corridor conversations. Many misinterpreted the comments as an attack, by the regulator, on online education as a whole. But as two people who were ‘in the room where it happened’, we believe this response has missed the critical issue.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t a question of whether online education has value. Of course it does, especially when it is properly integrated into a broader educational framework. The key concern lies specifically with degrees conducted entirely online without any supervised verification of student learning. While online learning and the assessment of it can be an excellent complement to traditional education or even comprise almost all of a degree program, allowing completely unsupervised assessment of online learning necessarily compromises the integrity of that award. This presents as a significant problem.
While the solution to this problem isn’t complex, it does require educational providers to face an uncomfortable truth. For an award to be worthy of trust it must provide genuine assurance of learning. In a world where Generative AI exists, this now requires some form of in-person supervised verification.
This could be as simple as assessment events held in person at university campuses, partner institutions, or regional study centres. The supervision and the assessor don’t even need to be in the same place, as long as someone the institution deems to be worthy of trust is co-located with the student to verify their identity and ensure that their behaviours are appropriate. Importantly, not every assessment moment needs this level of verification. This is certainly not an insurmountable barrier, and many successful programs already combine online flexibility with periodic in-person components. Education providers and their students need to accept that this is now part of the cost of award integrity.
Critics might argue this breeds inequity. But what’s also inequitable is allowing everyone’s degrees to lose value because educational institutions won’t implement reasonable verification measures. The casual dismissals by the general public of university qualifications aren’t just idle commentary; they’re symptoms of a deeper crisis in public trust. When people question whether an award holds any real value, they’re not just criticising fully online programs, they’re articulating scepticism and unease about the trustworthiness and, therefore, the value of higher education as a whole.
The path forward isn’t about restricting access to education or eliminating online learning; it’s about ensuring that the convenience of online delivery doesn’t come at the cost of educational integrity. A degree should mean something, regardless of how, where and when the teaching is delivered and the learning attained. But that meaning comes from more than just submitting assignments – it comes from verifying that genuine student learning has occurred. This is something that entirely unsupervised online programs cannot now guarantee.
Professor Cath Ellis is Pro Vice-Chancellor Quality and Integrity at Western Sydney University and Professor Mollie Dollinger is Director of Assessment 2030 at Curtin University.
