Good answers, guys!

Demigrog - your on-line course sounds less than ideal. I'm surprised it wasn't set up to give you instant feedback and help. Did you have to wait for a human teacher to get back to you all the time?

Can you remember when you sat the course and the test? I'd particularly like to know about the test, as I'm guessing the people who programmed it now know to look out for bugs!

davidlpf - from your post, I think you are emphasising the importance of assessment, regardless of how the teaching is delivered.

Mike - I like the idea of experimental math, particularly when you can use it to demonstrate the cool stuff you've mentioned. Of course, it is in theory possible to do those things without a computer, but it would be so incredibly laborious that in practice it would probably never happen unless you had a huge amount of time on your hands, and a worrying degree of single mindedness. It seems to me that there are parallels with chaos theory here - the sheer speed of number crunching enabled people to perform iterative calculations that led to fractals.