ABSTRACT
In the last 25 years higher education in the UK has changed considerably: the number of students has more than doubled, with a much wider and more mixed profile of age and background. While public funding has increased in real terms (although stayed about the same as a percentage of GDP) the unit of funding per student has dramatically fallen. After a very rapid increase in student numbers between 1988 and 1993, the Government capped the number of publicly funded undergraduate students and withdrew almost all funding for capital expenditure (The National Committee of Inquiry into Higher Education, 1997). This increase in diversity of students with less money to teach them has inevitably led to changes in the way students are taught, where they are taught and how they learn. There has been a shift from an instructional approach (where the teacher essentially supplies information and “facts” for students) to a constructivist approach where the teacher supplies the “scaffold” for learning, but the learner is expected to be active and to take responsibility for their own learning; a student-centred rather than a teacher-centred learning paradigm. In this approach the student needs to be able to access learning resources, either that are generally available in libraries through books, journals etc. or material specifically generated for the course by tutors, which may be made available to the student electronically via virtual learning spaces — for example WebCT or Blackboard. Additionally, of course, there is also now a huge amount of unvalidated material available via the world wide web (Armitage et al., 2002).
