In my capacity as a Language Teaching Development Officer at the ESML Department of the University of Bath I have been involved in the project of designing e-learning sites for Russian-English studies. The resulting electronic facilities for teaching and learning had the following functionality:

• Setting translation exercises of various types on-line, and providing an immediate assessment of the student's efforts together with detailed feedback. Exercises involved tasks of evaluating different versions of translations of the same text; the feedback thus sorted the variety of different versions according to their quality, with all the errors corrected and explained, and comments and suggestions provided.
• Setting translation assignments on-line with the provision for the students to submit their work electronically, to view all the submitted translations and to discuss them in the chat-room. The facility for the teacher's feedback to be supplied on-line is also provided. Assignments have been set for the both languages in question.
• An opportunity of conducting translation classes on-line is provided together with various other services such as discussion forums, collective students' efforts, etc.

I thus gained experience of working with two different Virtual Learning Environments: Blackboard and Moodle. In addition to designing new materials, as well as systematizing and digitizing existing ones, and incorporating them into existing web-platforms, I have also enhanced the existing facilities. This was done by programming in html and using original methods and ideas to shortcut the restrictions and rigid structures of the VLEs in order to give them some additional features, characteristic more of specific-purpose web sites.