By Dr Nicola Charwat, Dr Kate Burns, Professor Chris Thompson, Professor Claire Palermo

Posted Monday 9 November, 2026

At Monash, we recognise that the most significant questions in higher education rarely have simple solutions. Challenge Conversations are a dialogue designed to help our teaching community explore complex educational problems.

Inspired by the PAAIR project, these conversations bring together panels of specialists, students, and practitioners with different perspectives on an issue. Their task is not to solve the challenge, but to think it through out loud, grappling with messy intersections of technology, pedagogy, inclusivity, and leadership, and more.

In this ninth conversation, Dr Nicola Charwat, Dr Kate Burns, Professor Chris Thompson and Professor Claire Palermo explore how electives fit into programmatic approaches to assessment, the benefits of assisting students to be able to recognise and articulate their programmatic learning and the importance of collaboration.

This conversation was held on 30th October, 2026. The recording and key takeaways from the conversation are below.

The captions in this recording are auto-generated. Please excuse any minor inaccuracies or phonetic errors. You can also explore our playlist of previous Challenge Space recordings.

Panellists

• Dr Nicola Charwat, Associate Dean of Learning and Teaching and a Senior Lecturer in Business Law and Taxation at Monash University
• Dr Kate Burns, Deputy Head of School (Education) and Senior Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University
• Professor Chris Thompson, Director of Education at the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute
• Professor Claire Palermo, Deputy Dean (Education) in the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences at Monash University

Key takeaways

This Challenge Conversation considered how programmatic approaches to assessment can work with electives, including how course learning outcomes might be evidenced while maintaining flexibility of choice for students. The discussion considered how to meaningfully connect learning across individualised pathways and help students recognise and articulate the capabilities they develop via engagement with a wide range of topics.

The panel began by recognising the complexity of adapting programmatic approaches to assessment, that were conceived in medicine and health professions programs with clearly defined competencies, to courses with more flexible structures.

Flexible pathways supporting a coherent course experience

The panel emphasised the importance of preserving student choice and flexibility while recognising the challenge of designing coherent yet highly individualised assessment pathways.

Panellists discussed approaches their faculties were using to address this complexity. For example, shared graduate capabilities and faculty-wide assessment principles can provide common foundations across core units and electives, while recommended elective pathways can help students make choices that support their goals and interests.

For the Business and Economics Faculty, adopting programmatic approaches meant embracing complexity in considering the key capabilities all graduates would need at the end of their degrees.

It was never going to be on our minds that we would produce a more rigid, structured course plan for students just so that we could do programmatic assessment. We needed to find a different approach. – Nicola Charwat

And capabilities such as teamwork could also work as a connector of different elements of learning across electives.

The things that matter across disciplinary boundaries are things that we can have as common threads. – Claire Palermo

Student recognising and articulating programmatic learning

Panellists discussed increasing students’ understanding of programmatic approaches to assessment to help them build richer programs of learning for themselves. Electives give students opportunities to build capabilities and learning across disciplines and pursue their interests. However, without support to help them make sense of how different learning fits together, electives can feel disconnected from the wider learning journey.

We know that a lot of students might get to the end of their degree, and they have learned a lot of skills, but they don’t know how to articulate it. – Kate Burns

Helping them identify, okay, where were those [for example] communications skills developed across those electives? Because 100 students are going to have done 100 different combinations of electives. – Chris Thompson

Collaboration strengthening course design

The panel also highlighted collaboration as central to developing programmatic learning across disciplines. Conversations between educators that are involved in teaching electives across units, courses and faculties can lead to sharing perspectives and assessment practices, and identifying gaps, which can then lead to more cohesive approaches to assessment. 

It is a real opportunity to get all unit coordinators together, to talk to each other, to be thinking about… what the assessments are doing, what students are doing across their whole course. – Kate Burns

Monash University’s Programmatic Assessment and AI Review (PAAIR) project has helped facilitate such conversations.

Through consistent feedback from different [PAAIR] panels and the ongoing conversations that we’ve been having, and seeing how other faculties have been working with, with PAAIR and how they’ve made that work. So it’s been really, really enriching. – Nicola Charwat

The conversation highlighted how challenging but also how important it is to consider the role of electives in students’ broader journeys. Balancing choice and coherence, finding space for educators from different units to talk with each other, and actively designing ways of supporting students to make sense of how learning from different units can fit together are some of the challenges ahead, and these challenges are likely to be inspiration for future conversations.

_{Note: Extraction of quotes and paraphrasing for this blog was supported by ChatGPT.}