The Virtual Business Enterprise (VBE) is a digital learning resource consisting of a number of small retail businesses. Each semester student groups are allocated a VBE business and these groups 'trade' in 2 sessions across the semester. After each session, a complete set of financial statements is generated for each business. The final set of financial statements is used as a starting point for the business plan assignment linked to the VBE exercise.

Students complete a short (800 word) analysis of a visual text of relevance to their discipline, including photographs or artworks. Rather than simply describing the image or artwork, students are expected to critically engage with the visual stimuli and discuss it using themes and concepts covered throughout the course.

Delivered instead of weekly tutorials, students construct weekly Blackboard blog posts responding to a question and critically addressing key theoretical underpinnings from readings. Designed to elicit theoretically rich conversations, students use written styles similar to those from popular online forums as a means to participate in collegiate debates beyond academia.

Informed by an active learning pedagogy, this technique sees students co-create an online wiki to which contributions are individually marked. Students work collegiately to prosecute an overall argument that responds to a set question, but receive marks for the quality of their individual input; which addresses potential discrepancies in contribution.

Students submit an argumentative piece on a contemporary topic relevant to their discipline of study. Pending staff approval, students can submit this assessment in a number of written or multimodal formats such as an editorial for The Conversation, a government report, or a short audio-visual documentary.

Designed with an explicit focus on developing writing skills in first year students, this assessment adopts a design approach to a staged writing project. This assessment is divided into several scaffolded tasks that must be completed and submitted cumulatively throughout the semester.

In this summative e-delivered assessment students develop a case formulation in which they synthesise key aspects of a written vignette to provide a cohesive narrative of the reasons for the clinical presentation and vulnerability and strengths of the individual described in the vignette, adhering to strict character limits.

Students complete their exam papers whilst being invigilated through Zoom focus mode which allows not only a view of the student and their immediate surrounds, but also allows for the student’s screen to be shared with staff.