 Working with students to design assessments or elements of assessments together can help them avoid breaches of academic integrity. By involving students in the assessment design process, it increases their sense of ownership of the assessment. It's also a good example of student-centred assessment and treating students as partners. Let's look at how you might do this by taking DCU's virtual learning environment loop as an example. Students can use the forum activity in loop to share their thoughts with you as the lecturer and with their peers and have an asynchronous discussion on certain assessment issues. On your loop course page, click turn editing on, select add an activity or resource and choose forum. Use the forum name and description fields to give the forum a title and an explanation as to what it is about. It will be beneficial to give some thought as to how you would structure the forum. Perhaps set up different discussion threads on different topics to keep things organised. You could create all threads at once or paste the discussion by discussing one thread at a time. Use the description field to explain to students how the forum is organised. In the forum type drop-down menu, the default option standard forum for general use is probably best as it allows students to post and reply to one another. But there are other types of forum available if you want a more restricted discussion. Most of the default settings are sufficient and do not need to be altered unless you have a specific reason for doing so. You may wish to explore the different subscription options. Optional subscription means students can choose whether to subscribe to threads and receive email notifications. Forced subscription means all students are subscribed and cannot unsubscribe. Auto subscription means students are subscribed initially but can choose to unsubscribe at any time. And subscription disabled means no subscriptions are available at all. I'm going to set activity completion for this activity as well so that students will be deemed to have completed this task if they view it and if they create at least one discussion or reply. This is of course an optional step. Click save and return to course. The forum is now ready but empty. So let's go start some discussion threads. Click to access the forum and click add a new discussion topic. This will be the start of your first discussion thread to which students will reply. It's a good idea to keep specific discussions tied to specific threads so that posts related to one another are kept together. Enter a title for your first thread in the subject field. In the message field enter the body of your post. By default you as the poster will be subscribed to the thread. You can also add an attachment to the post by using the drag and drop attachment box. Click post to forum. The thread has now been created and students can read it and start to post replies. Monitoring the discussion forum takes time so it is good practice to set some time during the week to check students posts. You as the lecturer can respond to certain posts by clicking reply and then typing your message. I'm going to use this forum to discuss one thread at a time with students and only move on to another topic once we have agreement. When satisfied with the discussion in one thread I can create a new thread by clicking add a discussion topic and going through the same steps. It's important to put effort into facilitating the discussion by responding to students and prompting them so that discussion flows between all parties. In this way students can make measured thought out contributions to the design of their assessment and feel like co-owners in the process.