We have used on-campus and on-line courses in bioinformatics as a testing ground for controlled experiments in the area of learning and teaching. The aim of our project was to examine how well students integrate the three different subjects in Bioinformatics and how such integration can be promoted in the future by the new electronic technology. Our educational research efforts are connected to projects within the Wallenberg Global Learning Lab, WGLN.

The experiments performed have resulted in a new evaluation-based learning model that was jointly developed by the faculty and the members of the assessment team at the Swedish Learning Lab. The basis of this model is to let the students play an active role in evaluating and redesigning the e-learning environment so as to fit with their individual needs and limitations. To accomplish this, daily on-line evalutions were used to record the thoughts and concerns of the students during the course. After the examination, the course evaluations were used as a basis for project works in which the students and the teachers worked jointly on improving gaps in the understanding of important concepts as revealed by the exam as well as by the extensive evaluations. As a result of the project works the students created new pages for the web-based resource material used in the on-line and on-campus courses that presented the content in what they considered to be a more understandable manner.

The aim was to improve students understanding as well as the learning environment for next year's students. This method of learning is reciprocal in the meaning that the teachers guide the students learning in response to their individual needs (teacher to student), and the students then guide the teachers in how to design a learning environment that full-fills these individual needs (student to teacher). We believe that a reciprocal, evaluation-based collaborative learning scheme will solve part of the problems posed by new, cross-disciplinary subjects by fostering integration in a learning-productive manner. As a result of these efforts, we believe that the on-line and on-campus-learning environments will gradually merge.