Welcome to the May TAC Update
The Council is committed to increasing Registered Training Organisation (RTO) capability and quality by providing professional development opportunities through the TAC Education Program. As part of this program, the Council hosted its second annual event on 18 May 2022, exclusively for TAC registered providers.
Two new workshops were delivered including Strategies for Quality Training and Delivery and Assessment: avoiding the pitfalls. These workshops were developed based on extensive consultation via RTO engagement, TAC education program surveys and audit compliance data.
The event was well attended with participants from both metropolitan and regional RTOs, providing a great opportunity to network with other providers, and meet with TAC Members and TAC Secretariat staff. TAC would like to thank all RTO staff who attended the event.
If you were unable to join us on the day, a video recording will be available shortly via the TAC website's Professional Development Recordings and Resources webpage.
TAC Education Program - upcoming events
June 2022
1 - Industry Engagement
Click here to view the full TAC Education Program schedule and/or register for an event:
The full list of Education Program recordings and resources is available on the TAC Website
Focus on quality - How to ensure authenticity
With the growth of online learning, particularly when face-to-face learning is a challenge, there is an increasing risk of assessment fraud and the submitting of evidence which is not that of the enrolled student - evidence that is not authentic.
This comes in many guises: plagiarism, impersonation, collusion, fabrication, and old-fashioned cheat sheets. This is not new.
Whenever work is completed unsupervised with take-home assignments, distance delivery, projects and workplace tasks there is the potential for fraud. It has been noted in a number of reports that it is a large and growing problem, one that VET providers must take very seriously because the award of a certificate is a declaration by the RTO that the bearer of that certificate is competent and ready to function productively and safely in the workplace. A certificate based on unauthentic evidence is itself not authentic.
This is not a call for all assessments to be observed and supervised. What is needed is a formal publicised process to authenticate unsupervised assessment evidence. The process needs to be formal in that it routinely checks for authenticity, and that it is publicised because an effective process will act as a deterrent to assessment fraud.
One strategy is to utilise face-to-face opportunities (such as the observation of skills) to re-ask some of the questions set online and look for inconsistency, another is to look within the learner’s work for changes in writing or ‘voice’. Another is to look for text repeated by a number of learners or borrowed unacknowledged from other sources.
There are a number of digital systems to monitor authenticity, but all can be defeated or avoided by digital means or by using them to adjust the evidence until any appearance of fraud has been erased. At the end of the day there is no substitute for knowing your learners and being alert to atypical or unexpected performance evidence that is not their own.
For further information on this topic, please refer to a number of useful links below:
- TAC Factsheet - Assessment
- TAC Factsheet - Distance and online training and assessment
- TEQSA - Sector Alert - Financial Inducements encouraging students to upload course content to file sharing websites - 28 April 2022
TAC Secretariat Staffing
Morena Stanley, Director Training Regulation at the TAC Secretariat will be taking leave at the end of May 2022 and will return later in 2023. Details regarding the backfill arrangements for Morena's position will be announced in the coming weeks.
TAC Education Program for 2022 - 2023
Planning for the 2022-2023 TAC Education Program is finalised and designed based on feedback from stakeholder consultations, workshop evaluations and RTO compliance levels at audits.
The TAC Education Program for 2022-2023 includes the Council’s well established webinars, factsheets, animations and podcasts and will continue to support RTOs in meeting their compliance obligations and continuous improvement.
Keep an eye out for details via the TAC Education Program webpage.
Course Accreditation updates
Council accredited course 52894WA Advanced Diploma of Applied Electrical Engineering (Renewable Energy).
Council extended the accreditation period for 52895WA Certificate IV in Preparation for Health and Nursing Studies.
Other important updates
Latest NCVER Reports
NCVER's 31st National Vocational Education and Training (VET) Research Conference 'No Frills' will again be hosted online this year.
The conference will be held from Wednesday 6 to Friday 8 July 2022 with this year's conference theme being VET's role in transforming the future.
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