Many of todays students in further and higher education do not have a traditional approach to learning. The reasons for this include current teaching styles in schools, a crowded curriculum and an even more crowded life, both on campus and off.

For many, the need to earn a living eats into basic learning time and, for those following multidisciplinary programmes, there is the difficulty of balancing the competing demands of a variety of subjects.

Add to this the cost of traditional textbooks and the inadequacy of library funding and it is obvious that a different approach to teaching and...