Compliance with conditions made by rightsholders, for example, involves the imposition of passwords to which students object. As students are a large and diverse group, it is also impossible for any one system to meet their needs as easily as it might those of individual module leaders in respect of their own module readings. Students, for example, have different degrees of computer literacy. Some want a very simple system. Others want a system offering a much more sophisticated searching mechanism.
Compromises are necessary.
It is far easier to provide flexibility, within ResIDe's modular approach, for individual lecturers. Students are, inevitably, treated as one homogeneous group or, at least, one homogeneous group, with each module. Consequently, ResIDe has been developed to offer a standardised and very user-friendly interface and search engine that is sufficiently flexible to be adapted by individual module leaders to support their perception of their own students' needs. Following consultation with module leaders, for example, documents can be named and displayed in different ways to support different teaching and learning outcomes. Hypertext links to full-text databases to which the Library subscribes might be added to meet different pedagogic objectives.