What is the Virtual Training Suite?
The Virtual Training Suite aims to help university students to develop Internet research skills to assist with their university coursework and assignments.
We offer over 60 free Internet tutorials, each covering Internet research skills for a different subject - there's one for most of the subjects taught in UK universities, with a few extras covering skills that are relevant across disciplines.
The tutorials were written by a team of UK university lecturers and librarians.
Find out which Web sites they recommend, and get some authoritative and reliable advice from these experienced Internet researchers.
The service aims to support students, lecturers and researchers in UK higher education, but is currently freely available for anyone to use in line with our copyright.
The Internet tutorials
The tutorials aim to help students learn how to make discerning use of the Internet to help find information for coursework, literature reviews or personal research.
Each tutorial is divided into four main sections, which enable you to:
- TOUR - the best of the Web for your subject of study.
- DISCOVER - how to find scholarly information online.
- JUDGE - which Internet resources are appropriate for university work.
- SUCCESS - learn by example, how to use the Internet for academic research.
These are teach-yourself tutorials which can be done at the time and place that suits you. There are quizzes and interactive exercises to lighten the learning and no one is monitoring or marking you.
To work through all the sections of a tutorial will take around an hour, though you might prefer to do one chunk at a time over more than one sitting, or focus on the sections that are most relevant to you.
Who runs the Virtual Training Suite?
Until August 2011 the Virtual Training Suite was managed by a team at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol. It is now hosted and managed by TutorPro
The service was originally developed under a number of JISC development programmes and with funding from a number of different sources.