Celebrating inclusive assessment: spotlight on Joanna Tai’s OER “Leading Assessment for Inclusion”
Welcome Open Ed News, a dedicated space in the Deakin Library’s blog, Article, for celebrating, showcasing, and raising awareness about Open Education at Deakin.
This month, we are delighted to spotlight an outstanding Open Educational Resource (OER), published through the Library’s OER publishing service: Leading Assessment for Inclusion. Developed by Associate Professor Joanna Tai (CRADLE) in collaboration with colleagues from Central Queensland University and Massey University, this resource champions a vital message: assessment design should begin with inclusion. Moreover, by releasing it under a Creative Commons licence, Joanna and her team ensure that educators everywhere are free to retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the resource.
According to Joanna, “there are many little things people can do that actually make a big difference for what students experience and how students experience higher education.” (CRADLE News, 1 May 2025). Leading Assessment for Inclusion addresses this idea and questions such as:
- What does “assessment for inclusion” mean, and why does it matter?
- What does inclusive assessment look like in practice, across different contexts?
- What opportunities and challenges arise when trying to change assessment practices?
- Who is responsible for promoting assessment for inclusion, and how can everyone play a role?
The development of Leading Assessment for Inclusion was made possible through Deakin’s OER Grant program, extending an earlier Council of Australasian University Leaders in Learning and Teaching (CAULLT) funded project.
To learn more about how Joanna and the team created the resource, watch this short video (5:00 min): Leading Assessment for Inclusion (available via Panopto, for Deakin users only).
We celebrate Joanna and her team for their commitment to openness, collaboration, and inclusive education and for making Leading Assessment for Inclusion freely available to all. We invite you to explore Leading Assessment for Inclusion resource and share your reflections with the authors.
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To access Open Education services, please navigate to Open Education via the Deakin Library website. You can also get in touch with us:
- Contact your librarian for support with OER searching and discovery
- Contact the Open Education team about your OER project
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In the spirit of Open Education’s values of openness and transparency, we’d like to share that ChatGPT supported some early outlining and drafting of this article. The author carefully reviewed, refined, and verified all content, which was also peer-reviewed before publication.