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SCAM, a Web-based audit-teaching package, uses a ficticous supermarket designed to give students a familiar business environment: www.scam-plc.co.uk/ The web site comprises of a collection of resources including:

Accounting students are asked to complete an assessed audit coursework in their final year. The students work in groups to review the material and ask questions of key staff to plan for an audit. The benefit of this web-based system is that it allows students to choose when & where to learn. It exposes them to the audit experience and enhances their group work and transferable skills. Within this flexible learning environment, students must:

Finesse (Finance Education in a Scalable Software Environment) is a computer game developed by a consortium of lecturers at three universities to enhance the teaching of finance courses at the undergraduate and postgraduate level.

The purpose of the game is to demonstrate to students the difficulties of selecting and managing a portfolio of securities in a realistic setting. The game has been designed to enable students to build on finance material that has been covered in classroom lectures and tutorials.

Students in the labs

Finesse commences at the beginning of the course and runs throughout the academic year. Students are assigned to one of several groups and each group is given a notional £100m to invest actively and a further £100m to invest in a tracker fund. Groups are encouraged to develop a strategy for their active investment portfolio at the beginning of the year and make investments based on this strategy. Any un-invested money earns a money-market rate of interest.

An initial supervised tutorial is held to introduce students to Finesse by means of a two-hour, structured computer laboratory session where students are provided with documentation about the game and shown the different features of the system. At this tutorial students are given the uniform resource locater (URL) and logged onto the game.

Portfolio Summary

After this laboratory session, the student groups are allowed to set up their own portfolios, trade any number of securities in the UK, Euronext and Australia at daily market prices throughout the year, observe any transaction costs that they incur, and receive any dividends paid. In addition, they are provided with historical information about every security and each sector. In particular, earnings per share, price-earnings ratios and share price information.

Within Finesse there are three main components that are used for teaching, monitoring and communication. The first is a web-based portfolio management facility, which incorporates many features not available on other portfolio management sites. For example, other web sites ignore transaction costs in calculating the profit or loss on a portfolio, or restrict the number of portfolio transactions, while others require a subscription payment. These problems are tackled by Finesse. The second feature of Finesse is a communication facility between group members and staff - the 'Notebook'. This Notebook provides a historic record of the group's communication, is linked to all the pages of Finesse, allows group members to send e-mails to each other as well as enabling a member of staff to offer advice. The third feature is the facility for supervising, monitoring and tutoring students, known as Tutor and Group Support or TAGS (Allison et al., 1999).