Diverse leaders driving an institutional culture of academic integrity: Perspectives from Academics and Administrators
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In this webinar, presenters illustrate how they practice distributed leadership in academic integrity. They share perspectives of both academic and administrative staff, showing how they influence the culture of academic integrity at their institutions, even without holding senior leadership positions. According to Sutherland-Smith (2024), leadership in academic integrity should be distributed among individuals, organizations, governments, and communities of learners and educators. However, ensuring that leadership, especially in educational approaches to academic integrity, is effectively enacted can be challenging.
The recent Advance HE Framework for Leading in Higher Education highlights that the leadership experience and impact of leaders in higher education do not always align with their level of responsibility. This is particularly true for academic integrity, where junior academic and professional staff often need to exercise distributed leadership. They navigate and lead others through complex, uncertain, and high-risk situations, such as issues related to contract cheating and generative artificial intelligence, in ways typically expected of senior leaders (Lawson, 2025, p.7).
While leadership in academic integrity has been discussed in the Second Handbook of Academic Integrity and earlier works on the culture of academic integrity (e.g., Bretag, 2019, 2020; Bretag et al., 2011), the best practices for enacting distributed academic integrity leadership remain relatively unexplored in the Australasian university context – an issue that this webinar starts to address.
Presenters
Leading a Culture of Academic Integrity in the Disciplines: the role of Academic Integrity investigators / champions
Dr Ashokkumar (Ashok) Manoharan is a senior lecturer in strategic management at the College of Business, Government and Law at Flinders University. He is a member of the Centre of Social Impact and is a mixed-method researcher with research expertise in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in hospitality, specifically focusing on people with intellectual disabilities and culturally diverse workers. He brings this equity lens to his work as an academic integrity officer in the College of BGL and as lead of the academic integrity investigator community of practice.
Dr Narelle Hunter is a Senior Lecturer and Senior Academic Integrity Officer for the College of Science and Engineering at Flinders University. Her research focusses on science students’ disciplinary literacy. Narelle works across disciplines to support staff and students to uphold the values of academic integrity and ethical use of GenAI technology.
Heather Weber is Senior Academic Integrity Coordinator for the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at Flinders University. A registered physiotherapist and lecturer teaching into undergraduate and postgraduate programs, she has a particular interest in navigating artificial intelligence in academia while providing comprehensive support for colleagues in promoting academic integrity and managing breaches.
Leading Academic Integrity through Assessment Design
Dr Mathew Hillier specialises in e-assessment in higher education. He is co-lead of the ASCILITE SIG “Transforming Assessment”. He previously held roles in academic staff development programs at several Australian universities. Mathew has led multiple cross and intra institution projects that explored and established authentic, computerised, high-stakes assessment (e-Exams). Prior to that he has taught within Business, Information Systems, Engineering and Arts programs at several universities in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. Mathew is currently an adjunct Associate Professor at University of Canberra. Connect with Mathew via LinkedIn at http://mathewhillier.com.
Leading a Culture of Academic Integrity from the Centre: the role of Academic Integrity administrators
Dr Amy Milka is the Academic Integrity Manager in the Division of Academic and Student Engagement (DASE) at the University of Adelaide. She drives strategy and activities to build a culture of academic integrity, including student engagement, education, data analysis, reporting and risk mitigation. Amy leads a team of academic integrity investigators to support case management and complex investigations, in addition to maintaining a high level of subject matter expertise and sector knowledge, designing and managing processes and supporting policy implementation.
Amanda Janssen is a lecturer in academic development focussed on academic integrity at the Teaching Innovation Unit at the University of South Australia. Her work involves ensuring academic integrity is embedded in curriculum development and assessment design, developing procedures and systems for academic integrity and resources for students and staff across all domains. She has significant experience in planning, leading, and implementing academic integrity strategies for both staff and students.