This paper briefly reviews the teaching and assessment strategies developed over ten years of trials with over 1200 undergraduate students to make effective use of virtual haptic simulators in higher education disciplines such as dentistry and nursing. In the last five years (2012–17) these strategies have evolved to include a range of technology enhanced learning resources (TEL) in a blended learning setting to assess the performance progression of students’ learning cavity preparation skills. Every students’ performance outcomes were retrieved from the hapTEL simulator log files for each task including the percentage of caries, healthy tissue and pulp removed. The use of a blend of video recorded short lectures followed by face to face teaching, pair working, haptic, visual images and sound feedback, and individual student assessment record keeping showed an improved reliability in performance of the work-stations and a consistently higher rate of student’s log files records compared with previous years. Records of students’ performance collected over two years showed that the HapTEL system enabled students to perform better at cavity preparation after practising over two sessions.