Assuring learning in an AI world: Meeting TEQSA's standards

What is learning assurance?

Learning assurance is an educational methodology used by higher education institutions to evaluate, demonstrate, and guarantee that students achieve specified learning outcomes through valid and reliable assessments.

Rather than focusing on individual student grades, learning assurance measures programme-level accountability, ensuring that a degree or credential represents verified subject mastery, critical thinking, and professional competence.

Learning assurance has now evolved from a passive data-collection exercise into an active mandate to verify authentic student capability behind every submission. Much like an open-book exam—where educators evaluate how a student synthesises and applies resources rather than just copying them—AI-permitted assessments require institutions to capture definitive evidence of a student's critical engagement, evaluative judgment, and cognitive ownership.

From global standards to TEQSA compliance

In Australia, this global quality standard is formalised as a strict regulatory requirement by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). Under TEQSA’s Higher Education Standards Framework, institutional compliance hinges on delivering a transparent audit trail of learning assurance.

Universities must deploy an active, evidence-based strategy that proves specific course learning outcomes are being met, even when AI tools are fully integrated into the workflow, ensuring that technology acts as a learning accelerator rather than a mask for gaps in student knowledge.

What assessment frameworks do TEQSA recommend?

TEQSA’s assessment reform for the age of artificial intelligence does not mandate any specific approach to assessment. But it does signpost to several respected frameworks emerging in Australia.

The University of Sydney’s two-lane model is deliberately binary, offering AI-permitted and AI-restricted assessment routes, mirroring traditional ‘open book’ or ‘closed book’ examinations.

UNSW Sydney’s multi-lane approach and the Artificial Intelligence Assessment Scale (AIAS) are designed to meet different institutional needs and fall broadly into the following categories:

• No AI allowed (work must be fully student generated)
• AI ideation (AI allowed in early research stages)
• AI-assisted editing (AI used to refine student’s content)
• AI-assisted generation (AI used to produce content with student oversight)
• Full AI integration (for assessing AI skills)

Why might AI-permitted assessment leave gaps in institutional oversight?

To meet TEQSA learning assurance expectations, institutions must demonstrate that their assessment strategies provide valid and reliable evidence of authentic student learning. In AI-permitted assessment, institutions need ways to evaluate how AI has shaped student work and the appropriateness of student use within the assessment context. If they can’t, their learning assurance is at risk.

A common misconception is that AI-permitted assessments reduce the need for oversight because AI use is allowed. In reality, AI-permitted assessments change the requirement to assure authentic student effort, but they do not reduce it.

• In AI-restricted assessments, institutions can establish authenticity through secure, offline assessment methods and the absence of access to AI
• In AI-permitted assessments, institutions need to show that learning outcomes have been achieved despite – and through – the use of AI tools

In the context of TEQSA learning assurance, institutions need to ensure that, whatever approach they choose, it includes a credible, evidence-based plan for assuring learning in an AI-assisted landscape.

How does visibility into the writing process support learning assurance?

Visibility into the writing process helps educators understand how students develop and refine their work, particularly within an AI-permitted assessment model. This strengthens the evidential base for determining whether specific learning outcomes have been achieved, and reduces TEQSA learning assurance compliance risk.

When educators can only assess final submissions, they have limited insights into how the student has developed their work or integrated AI within their composition practices.

In contrast, a system that provides visibility into the writing process lets educators assess the full learning and development journey – from how they respond to formative feedback on their first draft, to how AI has shaped and influenced their argument.

Put simply, process visibility is a way to transform ‘AI-permitted’ tasks into a valid assessment of a students’ own cognitive growth and critical engagement.

How does Turnitin Clarity support writing visibility and learning assurance?

Turnitin Clarity is a composition space where instructors create, and students complete, assignments. It was designed with educators to address the challenge of how to validate and support authentic student writing in the age of AI.

The platform provides educators with full visibility into students’ writing processes – via intuitive tools such as composition playback, writing timelines, version history, and similarity checks – so they can validate authentic student learning outcomes.

To support the responsible use of AI, Turnitin Clarity also offers a configurable AI assistant that gives students access to approved, assignment-appropriate tools to support their learning. This can be disabled, enabled, and fully tailored by educators who decide what support, if any, the AI assistant should provide – from grammar checking to ideation – and set the reading level of its responses to align with students’ needs.

By providing students with appropriate AI writing development tools – controlled by and visible to educators – Turnitin Clarity helps students develop AI literacy and authentic writing skills, within the bounds of both instructor pedagogical aims and institutional AI policy.

From detection to assurance with Turnitin Clarity

As Professor Jason Lodge, lead co-author on TEQSA's official AI assessment reform framework, recently put it: “We have to get to the point where we stop looking for evidence that students are using these tools to cheat and shift our emphasis to looking for evidence that learning has occurred.”

A transparent audit trail of how students develop their work – and how this process develops their subject mastery and professional competence – is the only way to assure learning in the AI era.

Regardless of which lane Australian institutions choose to follow, Turnitin Clarity provides:

• Visibility into the writing process that institutions need to authenticate student learning
• Transparency into the writing process for TEQSA’s learning assurance requirements
• Configurable AI tools to develop students’ AI literacy and critical thinking

Is your institution ready to move from ‘detecting AI’ to ‘assuring learning’?