The University of Edinburgh is one of the oldest in the UK having been founded in 1583 and with a long tradition of providing high quality first and higher degrees in most subjects, including all professions. It has a very substantial level of research in all subjects with almost all staff active in research at national or international levels.  This is reflected in the standing of the university in the top six in the UK in research, and top in Scotland, in both quantity and quality. The university has very strong international relationships in both teaching and research, and draws staff and students from all countries of the world. It is an active member of such international groupings as Universitas 21 and Coimbra Group.
 E-Learning is very widely used throughout the University of Edinburgh. In 2002 the Principal initiated a £5m e-Learning project fund and this has been used to set up projects in each of the three academic Colleges.  The Principal’s Fund projects are building on existing excellence and expertise in e-Learning, a major aim being to spread the use of e-Learning more widely through the academic community. There is a well-developed e-learning support and development service which provides course team’s access to VLEs, online assessment, web-logs, simulations etc. Recent developments have been in the areas of learning object repositories where we have created an Edinburgh RLO repository (LORE), in online assessment with a major development in e-assessment that goes beyond simple MCQs, and in explorations of the use of e-portfolios.