Summative and formative electronic assessment can be used in the foreign-language classroom to provide appropriate feedback to learners. However, this presupposes that the learners (and the teacher) are sufficiently informed about the use of digital media and have already tried and used them. Therefore, at the beginning of this chapter there is a brief update of digitization. Mostly, electronic assessment and feedback is used for summative determination of the achieved learning level; the higher education sector predominates. In school-based instruction, electronic assessment and feedback occur less frequently. However, these feedback practices have increased dramatically in recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the United States, but also in European countries. Electronic assessment can be used for more than just summative feedback.

Digitalization is strongly affecting the field of higher education. This chapter investigates the implications of digital tools for the future development of undergraduate research (UR). It asks how the design of digital learning environments and the provision of digital tools can contribute to UR. The chapter starts with outlining digitalization in higher education and the use of digital technology in undergraduate studies. Then, teaching and learning scenarios are presented that serve as design options to integrate digital learning environments in teaching for UR. Moreover, digital tools are analyzed that can support different phases and objectives of UR. Overall, the chapter stresses the importance to critically consider the added value of digital technology for learning in general and for the case of teaching and learning UR in particular. A well-elaborated instructional design plays a key role to develop and implement digital learning environments in UR, to spur student engagement and to foster social interaction successfully. The chapter concludes by discussing future trajectories for UR in the light of digitalization.

This conceptual piece attempts to evaluate the rising disruptions of students’ social networks due to the digital explosion and massification of education. Digitalised education has made impacts in terms of universalising and internationalising education, but there are corresponding disruptions in students’ social network system. It is perhaps safe to state that students’ social network is about to be exterminated. Thus, this effort is a holistic view of students’ network activities that can enhance interactivity, bonding, and attachment to promote multicultural and intercultural competencies. Education is only holistic when it stimulates the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains proportionately. Pathetically, technologisation and digitalisation threaten the existence of holistic education and make it a remnant of the past if scholarship discourse fails to address the challenge now. Hence, this endeavour recommends the inclusion of activities that can constantly bring digital students together from time to time to create room for interaction and socialisation.

An experience gap has opened up in the development of legal professionals. The workplace-based experiences (traineeships and articles of clerkship) that were once pivotal to the progress of law graduates from student to practitioner are either no longer available or are much diminished in scope and scale. Graduates are expected to have accessed such experiences through other avenues. This is a particular challenge for those law graduates who lack the family and social connections to help them start their engagement with the profession. In response to these changing circumstances Monash University has instituted a Clinical Guarantee assuring every law student a place in its Clinical Legal Education (CLE) programme if they so choose. In this chapter, we describe the Clinical Guarantee initiative, our progress to date, the way in which we have used technology to support provision and the challenges we have faced during implementation. We conclude by emphasising the value of CLE as preparation for modern legal practice, and outlining our intention to measure that value through future evaluation work. This chapter tells an Australian story, but one which resonates with experiences in other jurisdictions.

In the field of educational technology there are classic oppositions that shape what we do in our use of technology in higher education (HE) – behaviourism versus constructivism, open versus for-profit, conventional versus innovative curriculum design, technocracy versus democracy. Both sides of the binaries are critical components of what we might determine as the ‘social’ in HE, and the extent to which their oppositions govern our approach to curriculum design also determines the type of learning that our students undertake in their programmes. In this chapter we explore the effect of the antinomies on the development of simulation software designed and built last decade and still in use at Strathclyde Law School, and adapted elsewhere. The chapter will analyse the assumptions and the history – legal educational, technological and social – that are part of the software build and outline future use and expectations for the software as it develops beyond what might, to date, be characterised as its early beta or incunabula stages of development in HE. Above all we shall begin to trace what we hope is one resolution of the classic opposition of technocracy and democracy, a theme that will be developed in future publications.