Independent learning is one of the cornerstones of UK higher education yet it is poorly understood by students and is seen by politicians as a poor substitute for face to face teaching. This paper explores students' understandings, approaches and experiences of independent learning and how they may become more effective independent learners. This…

The focus of this article is on the experiences of staff members involved in a student support programme. The experiential, social, and student-centred approaches incorporated in this programme provided not only students, but also academics with pathways to lifelong learning. Functioning in a community of practice (CoP) (with students and also…

There are substantial reports on working-class student non-completion and the challenges of engaging or not with the teaching in higher education. The students in our study were all successful at university but the different universities provided different types of experiences for their respective students. In this paper we focus on the pedagogic…

What is the connection between student success and their approaches to learning? Do learning approaches develop with university experience? We explored these questions by constructing profiles using a specially developed fixed response instrument and administering this to students at two similar South African universities. Groups consisted of…

Existing research identifies that students' approaches to assignments are related to their general approaches to study. It is suggested that students need to better understand the requirements of assignments and acquire new concepts such as "argument". This fine-grained study proposes four qualitatively distinct assignment pathways: gathering,…

This paper reports the outcomes of a study, undertaken from a phenomenographic perspective, of academics' ways of experiencing or understanding being a university teacher. A range of understandings was found, representing in particular a varying focus on the experience of teaching as a: teacher transmission focused experience; teacher-student…

This research looks at student experiences of learning in a clinical teaching situation. At the end of a course, students took part in a class that was led by a user of the health system, rather than their usual lecturer. We chose to study this class because we knew that it provided a very different learning experience for the students and…