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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 article highlights the importance of developing trainee teachers' knowledge and understanding with respect to the Nature of Science (NoS), as this has long been considered an area of concern. The breadth of understanding of NoS can influence a teacher's ability to engage with enquiry and can determine their ability to teach effectively. However, prior research studies of pre-service teachers' views about NoS clearly indicated that teachers did not typically possess coherent and informed views of the ways science works, and, in addition, different cultures and nationalities hold quite diverse and distinct perceptions and understanding about NoS. With this in mind, the development of trainee NoS knowledge and understanding in pre-service training was embarked upon at the Cass School of Education and Communities, University of East London (UEL). This article describes how tutors focused on challenging areas of the science teacher training curriculum and provided a way to measure the impact of planned interventions to improve understanding of the Nature of Science.

The article explores pre-service teacher training for Nature of Science (NoS) teaching in Great Britain. NoS can refer to the sociology and philosophy of science and it attracted much debate on whether it should be incorporated into the school curriculum. The area of Scientific Investigations is one of area where trainees expressed varying opinions. The author concludes that the study on NoS can help tutors address challenging areas identified in the science teacher training curriculum.