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The shift to online assessment during the pandemic has generated debates on academic integrity, also highlighting good practice in supporting students and staff. Academic integrity is commitment to six fundamental values: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage and academic misconduct refers to practices that are not in keeping with these values and this commitment. There seem to be two dominant threads in such debates in higher education: one involves promoting creative design of authentic assessment and guidelines to students about institutional expectations concerning academic offences such as plagiarism and collusion; the other provides technological and practical safeguards to protect academic integrity. In this paper, we report on the outcomes of a project that evaluated in 2020 the pivot to online assessment at the University of London, UK. Our focus is academic integrity in distance learning environments by exploring the key themes of student and staff perceptions, and related pedagogical issues. We propose a set of measures that can enhance students' perception of academic integrity and institutional approaches to mitigate against academic offences. [This paper was presented at the ICDE Virtual Global Conference Week 2021: Upskilling and upscaling for quality Open, Flexible and Distance Learning (OFDL) during the week of 25-29 October 2021.]

In 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic the higher education sector, in the United Kingdom and internationally, transitioned to online assessment, at a speed and scale which might have been unimaginable under normal circumstances. The priority in the sector was to ensure that fundamental principles of assessment, including integrity, were supported in the implementation of changes and no student was disadvantaged in accessing digital learning opportunities, when they were assessed. The paper focuses on a project that evaluated this transition and provided the opportunity to understand emergent approaches to assessment. It explores the transition from the perspective of the experience of the stakeholders that have been affected, primarily students and staff. It identifies processes and formats of assessment that worked efficiently and examines the implications for future practice in distance learning environments and for the sector.

This paper sets out the ways in which technologies for learning have been at the heart of education for development for millennia, not as is sometimes thought only in the last 30 years of the digital revolution. Short case studies of the University of London External System and the Open University UK set out the development outcomes of these major distance education innovations. The context of widening access to Higher Education is acknowledged, in particular from the perspectives of student success and dropout. The major dimensions of open education enabled by digital affordances are elaborated, and their contribution to development acknowledged. Finally, the article suggests that the move to mass Higher Education systems in an overall majority of countries over the period of the UN Sustainable Development Goals will see the distinctions between online and campus-based modes diminished.

This research paper addresses the issues of integration of technology enhanced learning (TEL) into an educational organization. Good practice experience cannot be directly transferred to new organisations due to different contextual conditions. The TEL integration depends significantly upon a very rapid development of services and information communication technologies (ICT). Some organizations have managed to go step by step with the developments and have become leaders in TEL provision, however others, though having successful examples, have not succeeded in reaching the service level they want. While many positive examples exist in research literature, it is rare that institutions have complete strategies or solutions for integrating TEL that meet their specific pre-conditions and satisfy quality assurance parameters at the same time. The research reported here aims at the development of a theoretical framework for quality assurance of TEL integration into educational organizations. During the research, the development of the TEL concept has been discussed, success indicators for TEL integration in an educational organization have been described, the quality parameters of TEL integration into an educational organization have been identified and the model for TEL integration into an organization has been developed.

This article reviews the discourse of mission in large distance teaching and open universities, in order to analyse the theories of development and social justice that are claimed or may be inherent in them. It is suggested that in a number of cases the claims are unsupported or naive. The article goes on to set out the nature of Amartya Sen's capability approach for development, and to identify its potential for reviewing distance and e-learning more widely as a contributor to development and social justice.

John Franklyn Venner was a chartered accountant and senior partner in an eminent City of London firm of accountants. However, between 1940 and 1945, Venner worked at the heart of the unorthodox and top secret Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was set up to facilitate clandestine warfare. Venner used the accounting orthodoxy of financial controls, the recording of transactions, and regular financial reporting to build a strong bond of trust and confidence with the Treasury and Bank of England. This provided space for Venner to develop unorthodox financing schemes, including black market foreign currency transactions, which generated millions of pounds of currency and made a major contribution to the war effort. Venner died in 1955 at age 52. This biographical microhistory, using archival sources, brings his story out of the shadows and demonstrates how an eminent chartered accountant navigated the unorthodox world of the SOE during the Second World War. Data Availability: All data used are available from the public sources cited in the text, apart from the transcripts of the two James Venner interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a framework within which the question as to the purposes of open universities should be examined. It argues that the question has become submerged over time through the establishment of so many open universities that have become natural elements in a higher education landscape rather than remaining radical and innovative institutions. The article looks at a number of innovative distance teaching higher education institutions from the nineteenth century through to the contemporary period, and examines case studies in a wide international range. The outcome of the argument is that open universities should articulate their purposes within a discourse of development, and engage with the ethical and political questions as to how development is understood and advanced.

A survey of 34 nurses found that 81% always complied with guidelines for caring for patients with human immunodeficiency virus or hepatitis B; only 31% complied when patients were low risk. Reasons for noncompliance were "no anticipated blood contact" (53%) or "too busy" (25%). (SK)

Discussion of student support in open and distance learning systems focuses on a framework for the development of a planning tool for student support services. Considers student characteristics; course or program demands; geographical environment; technological infrastructure; the scale of the program; and the requirements of management. (Author/LRW)