Students now have at their disposal a range of Web 2.0 authoring forms such as audio and video podcasting, blogging, social bookmarking, social networking, virtual world activities and wiki writing. Many university educators are interested in enabling students to demonstrate their learning by creating content in these forms. However, the design…

In this article, we articulate five principles of curriculum design and illustrate their application in a third-year undergraduate course for environmental and ecological scientists. In this way, we provide a practical framework for others wishing to enhance their students' learning. To apply the five principles, we created a learning environment…

This paper reports on the effects of automating formative feedback at the student's discretion and automating summative assessment with individualised spreadsheet assignments. Quality learning outcomes are achieved when students adopt deep approaches to learning (Ramsden, 2003). Learning environments designed to align assessment to learning…

Providing detailed, constructive and helpful feedback is an important contribution to effective student learning. Quality assurance is also required to ensure consistency across all students and reduce error rates. However, with increasing workloads and student numbers these goals are becoming more difficult to achieve. An automated feedback…