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This chapter presents survey results of learning and teaching methodologies and assessment of Final Year Engineering Projects (FYEP) as employed across several participating institutions throughout Australia and New Zealand. As a result of preliminary dialogue with practitioners within each institution, a number of common issues and discrepancies have been revealed. These issues include a lack of transparency and consistency in the field. Report findings indicate the need to engage in further dialogue with supervisors, lecturers, and students engaged in the FYEP process to develop best practice in the FYEP paradigm.

Learning materials development has traditionally been controlled by individual academics as distance education followed organisational models provided by traditional face to face teaching. Recent developments in both education and training have increased expectations of distance education. Increasing student participation rates, accessibility of higher education, increasing costs and exponential growth of knowledge are some factors that require development of innovative approaches to meet these expectations. Quality management literature suggests that these challenges may be met by a flexible but systematic, participative and team-based approach using quality improvement strategies. Developments in educational evaluation indicate that quality is promoted by an action-evaluation paradigm based on critical theory. Action evaluation promotes information gathering directed towards the making of specific decisions, a systems approach to evaluation, participative democracy in both decision making and evaluation and reflective practice. A marriage is proposed between action evaluation and quality management to guide the development of quality in distance education. Three strategies are suggested immediately: use of a team approach to materials development that is genuinely participative and democratic, collection of information about the quality of service provided to students in a way that promotes systematic improvement in the quality of that service and finally examination of all relevant aspects of educational services provided. This paper discusses the initial stages of the trial of such an approach as it is being developed within the Department of Mathematics and Computing at the University College of Central Queensland.

Knowledge is a model that enables premeditated change. Knowledge can be subdivided: the simplest element is information. Information aggregates/relations constitute a concept. Clusters of concepts make theories. Concepts and theories can be further branched into: conclusions, explanations, cognitions, etc, which together belong to a general class of Definition. Definitions are key elements of knowledge. Yet it appears that we do not sufficiently explain the nature of this concept of definition itself.There is little doubt about the importance of words and languages, however these semantic structures contain some intrinsic ambiguities. Knowledge records grow faster than its substance, and it is increasingly difficult to manipulate and communicate this voluminous structure. The interpretations of terms and knowledge can vary significantly, especially in the multidisciplinary context. Misiformation is exacerbated by vague definitions including synonyms, homonyms and acronyms.This paper attempts to contribute to defining the term 'definition' to alleviate the mentioned problems.