By Associate Professor Tim Fawns
Posted Tuesday 5 August, 2025

At Monash, we’ve recently introduced challenge space conversations, a new kind of dialogue inspired by Monash’s Programmatic Assessment and AI Review (PAAIR) project and our shared need to navigate educational problems or areas of inquiry where clarity is lacking and definitive answers are hard to come by. 

These conversations begin with a simple premise: invite the community to pose the tough, unresolved questions for which there’s currently no clear guidance, no simple solutions, and no ready-made resources. Hosted as online webinars, challenge space conversations bring together a panel of people with specialist knowledge who are tasked, not with providing answers, but with thinking aloud and grappling with the complexity of the issues. As the conversation unfolds, audience members contribute further difficult or fine-grained questions to push the conversation in interesting and unanticipated directions. The goal is not closure but momentum. We aim to surface new lines of inquiry, stimulate ongoing thinking, and maybe, over time, inform the creation of resources and guidance that can help us all move forward. 

These sessions are recorded so that others can revisit, reflect, and continue the discussion, including in the comments of this blog post or via social media. We have posted the recording of the first challenge space conversation below, along with some key takeaways. 

View the PAAIR Challenge Session 1: Programmatic Assessment video or read the full transcript.

In the first PAAIR Challenge Space Conversation, I chatted with two educational leaders about what it means to move toward programmatic assessment, not just structurally, but culturally and philosophically. Speakers:

• Professor Tansy Jessop, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Education and Students at the University of Bristol and author of Transforming the Experience of Students Through Assessment (TESTA)
• Professor Claire Palermo, Deputy Dean Education, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University and Academic Lead of the PAAIR Project
• Associate Professor Tim Fawns, Monash Education Academy and Academic Lead of the PAAIR Project

This first conversation features a presentation by Tansy from her excellent work on the Transforming the Experience of Students through Assessment (TESTA) project.

Key takeaways

• Start with the student journey: Programmatic assessment should begin by understanding how students experience learning across their course – not just how we administer it. 

“That’s a way to deal with some of that complexity we have with some of our courses that are not one size fits all.” (Claire Palermo)

• Iterative change with clear direction: Large-scale change isn’t immediate. Instead, institutions should make deliberate, incremental steps guided by shared direction. 

“We need to think hard and long about where it is that we would like to end up.” (Tim Fawns)

• Balance structure with flexibility: Moving forward requires new communication channels, shared structures, and space for discipline-specific adaptations. 

“Everyone will take a slightly different approach. Everyone will get a slightly different distance, but moving in that direction is important.” (Tim Fawns)

• Team-based curriculum design is essential: Sustainable change comes from collective action. Progress in programmatic assessment depends on everyone working together as a team, not alone. 

“It’s coming to an agreement about one or two things as a whole team and working together that gets progress round programmatic assessment.” (Tansy Jessop) 

What’s next?

This session kicks off a series of PAAIR Challenge Conversations aimed at deepening understanding and practice around programmatic assessment and AI integration at Monash. A recording of the second challenge conversation will be posted in a couple of weeks.