Thank you for these excellent comments. You are putting into educational-ese many of the ideas I have had. For the current course I am teaching, the 30% of the mark for lab reports (total, there are 5 of them), the 10% for assignments and 15% for the term project would all come under the category of formative assessment. These the students have options of how to hand them in (paper, electronic submissions...). In the past I have asked for term papers to be done in wikipedia style, and they got extra marks for posting them (as many did). In fact for a couple of students, all they did was send me the link.

I am sitting right now invigilating as my students write their midterm (worth 20%). I am wondering about an option to let the students write their final on a computer. It would obviously be open-web, so one would have to think very carefully about how to do that, but is it not more reflective of a real world situation? When I wonder about how something works in the run of my intellectual day, I don't sit there and try to remember exactly what I learned in a particular course... I will probably go to one of my trusted sites or journals and get a recent review. The tricky bit is to be able to critically evaluate the material and apply it to answer the question at hand.

Probably we aren't technologically ready at Mount A to do what I want to do for this year, with my luck the wireless would be down that day. I do want to think about it though.