Designed explicitly to provide student flexibility and cater to diverse learning styles, this technique has students produce a piece of written or audio-visual content in response to a provocation from a course practicum or theoretical perspective. Content can take numerous forms including a blog, critical review, documentary, or reflexive essay.

Students are assigned an extract from a draft manuscript (developed by a practicing author), for which they produce a professional editorial report. Students actively use skills taught throughout the course to make reasoned suggestions that improve the quality of the work, and may ultimately be realised in published copy.

Students travel to a relevant cultural institution or public space (e.g. gallery, museum, landmark), imagining they are appointed as industry experts, curators, attachés or tour guides. In groups, each student delivers a brief presentation on an assigned piece (e.g. artwork, artefact, or monument) so as to replicate professional presentation contexts.

This task is designed to allow students to demonstrate theoretical and methodological understandings of key themes and provocations from the course through an applied activity mimicking professional practice. Students select from a list of hypothetical scenarios (developed by the course coordinator) and construct a 3000 word report in response.

Students write a 1500 – 2000 word document (in a form decided by the convenor) in the language being taught. This is paired with an oral presentation based on the written piece. Students are assessed on grammatical proficiency and their ability to conform to stylistic conventions of the written genre.

This authentic assessment sees students collaborate to prepare and present a 5-minute pitch aimed at a hypothetical funding body. The imagined context is that this will precede a hypothetical five thousand dollar grant application for a product or project relevant to a specific disciplinary content or area of professional practice.

Students construct a 2000 word essay critiquing a film from their disciplinary perspective. This involves analysing salient aspects of plot situation, thematic elements etc. by applying relevant theories/concepts from the course content. This task particularly reinforces formative disciplinary knowledge (which often challenges early undergraduates) through engaging contemporary contexts.

Students are required to conduct field visits to two different sites of disciplinary relevance and write a comparative essay. Students are expected to draw on their first-hand, experiential knowledge of the site and link this to the broader theoretical and conceptual frameworks discussed in the course.

Delivered as part of a flipped classroom approach, this assessment encourages and rewards students who engage with content before designated class-time. Students complete feedback-rich, online quizzes (via Blackboard) related to the weekly content which serve to increase pre-class reading, engagement and learning, and form the basis for robust in-class discussions.

This technique comprises three scaffolded tasks (a discipline-specific essay, contemporary case study presentation and reflection) delivered as part of an holistic pedagogy. These tasks can be administered separately, but are consolidated within this entry as a showcase of a unified approach to assessment in the context of an entire course.