Covid-19 pandemic had an impact on many day-to-day activities but one of the biggest collateral impacts was felt by the education sector. The nature and the complexity of higher education is such that no matter how prepared we are as faculty, how planned our teaching and assessments, faculty are all too aware of the adjustments that have to be made to course plans, assessments designed, content delivery strategies and so on once classes begin. Faculties find themselves changing, modifying and deviating from original plans to ensure accessibility and inclusiveness, this may be due to a variety of reasons such as student abilities, behaviour, disturbances and even outside factors that may be political, environmental, social etc. Majority of the time, faculty are prepared for the change that needs to be incorporated and are quick to adjust. However, no one expected the disruption to education that was caused by COVID19 pandemic. The world came to a standstill while schools and universities scrambled to push learning to the digital space. It was important to try to ensure continuity of learning for students, but the issue of integrity came to the forefront by summertime. Faculties were suddenly expected to restructure their lessons, delivery, teaching and assessing digitally, at the same time ensuring and upholding integrity of the concepts taught and assessed. This has neither been easy or straightforward because the situation was unprecedented with little or no prior documentation or guidelines to help. Recognising this gap, this paper is an attempt at providing exploratory findings from authors’ experiences in their respective institutions over the ensuing months. The paper attempts to record the changes made by the faculty and colleagues to lessons and assessments with particular focus on how technology has been used to help restructure classes, deliver lessons and assess students which have aided in minimizing the likelihood of students cheating. The paper further narrates the reflective changes that were made in response to experience, student/external examiners feedback etc.

There is widespread agreement that collaboration, teamwork and intercultural competence, among others, are essential 21 st century skills. Higher education teaching and learning initiatives tend to have a significant focus on developing these skills through assessments and other in-class activities, and yet often do not take advantage of opportunities to collaborate with other institutions located in different countries to give their students an authentic, globalised learning experience. Previous transnational education projects have tended to encourage cross-institutional collaboration through engagement with host institution subjects/courses that are delivered at offshore locations. Although these initiatives are valuable, they tend to impose a 'neo-colonialism' approach and therefore may not develop 'transformative' international perspectives. This paper will present an initiative that was developed between two institutions located in Australia and Hong Kong, where their students collaborated on an assessment for learning task that involved developing a real-life solution for not-for-profit organisations, often located in a third country. The ideas discussed in this paper will be useful for anyone who is trying to create a more immersive, authentic learning experience for their students. These initiatives developed in our students a heightened sense of belonging to a truly globalised world we live in and instilled a shared responsibility of care. Ideas discussed in the presentation will also be useful for policy makers about how to go about creating more supportive policy and governance frameworks to encourage greater collaborations with offshore institutions in a truly respectful arrangement.

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