Welcome and overview

This video introduces Enterprise Professor Sandra Milligan.

Enterprise Professor Sandra Milligan is Director of the Assessment Research Centre at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. Sandra has an unusually wide engagement with the education industry and in educational research. Originally a teacher of science and mathematics, she is also a former Director of Curriculum in an Australian state education department and has held senior research, management and governance positions in a range of educational organisations, including government agencies, not-for-profits, small start-up businesses and large, listed, international corporations. Sandra’s current research interests focus on assessment, recognition and warranting of hard-to-assess learning. She directs several research partnerships with school networks and organisations working to develop Learner Profiles for their students. She is lead author of ‘Future Proofing Australian Students with New Credentials’ report, outlining methods to reliably assess and recognise the level of attainment of general capabilities, and of Recognition of Learning Success for All: Ensuring Trust and Utility in a New approach to Recognition of Learning in Senior Secondary Education in Australia.

Sandra will set the scene and provide an overview of the course, highlighting areas of focus and how the course has been designed to assist you to grow your understanding. You will be introduced to both academic experts and practitioners who are forward thinkers – “first movers” – both in Australia and internationally working to reimagine and influence schooling and other education organisations. These first movers are moving away from the grammar of schooling that continues to lock us into many of the distinctive features of the 20th-century version of education.

Educators need support as they move to incorporate the use of transparent, trusted, comparable, moderated, developmental, performance-based assessments of students’ levels of attainment in learning complex competencies into their assessment and recognition practices. That’s a lot of words, but it just shows the complexity of this work!

_{Paraphrased from Milligan, S. K., Luo, R., Hassim, E., & Johnston, J. (2020, September 7). Future-proofing students: What they need to know and how to assess and credential them (p. 5). Melbourne Graduate School of Education, the University of Melbourne. https://education.unimelb.edu.au/mgse-industry-reports/report-2-future-proofing-students}

We hope that this course will provide both challenge and hopefully some affirmation in relation to why, what and how to transform assessment and recognition practices. As an educator, you can impact young people’s learning and application of the complex competencies vital for life and work that are both valued and acknowledged.