 Including a defence component in an assessment can be an effective way of encouraging student authenticity and promoting good academic integrity. Students will be unable to defend their work successfully if they did not prepare the assessment themselves. Adding a defence component to an assessment means they must complete the work themselves. Let's look at how you might do this by taking DCE's virtual learning environment loop as an example. The assignment activity in loop can accept a variety of files and file formats. So in addition to requesting students to submit their assessment, be it a written paper, a poster, a presentation and so on, you can also ask them to submit their defence, which could be a written defence, reflective defence from their e-portfolio, a video or an audio clip and so on. On your loop course page, click turn editing on and click add an activity or resource and select assignment. Use the name and description fields to give a title for the assignment and directions to students as to what they should do. In addition to asking students to submit a written paper, I am going to ask them to record an audio clip in which to defend their work. Configure the date settings for the assignment and then proceed to the submission types area. There are three types of submission available, a loop reflect page where students can submit work from their e-portfolio, a file submission where students upload one or more files to loop, and online text where students can type directly into the assignment but also use the features of the HTML text editor to record audio and video. I am going to select file submissions in this instance because I want them to upload a written paper and I am also going to select online text because I want them to use the HTML text editor to record an audio clip for their defence. Loop reflect could be another submission type to utilise if you wanted them to write a reflective defence of their work in their e-portfolio and then submit that. Proceed to configure the rest of the settings as per your needs. You may want to give some thought as to how you grade the students using a scale perhaps or by using a grade and a particular grading method like a marking guide or a rubric. The advantage of that is that they can see the grading criteria in advance of their assessment and this links to principle 4. Click save and return to course when finished. Students submit to the assignment as normal, in this case uploading their written paper and also recording an audio clip using the online text editor. When the deadline passes you as the teacher can go into the assignment to retrieve the submissions and start grading. Click grade. The grading screen for the first student opens and on the left you can read their submission and annotate and on the right you can access their audio clip and also the rubric. Collapse the submission by clicking the collapse review panel button on the bottom right. Clicking the play icon in the audio clip will allow you to listen to the defence of the work. This is my audio defence of my written paper on Parnell at home rule.