Within EBL approaches, learners are encouraged to take responsibility for seeking evidence and analysing their knowledge with the purpose of making implicit reasoning and tacit knowledge explicit (Price 2003).

The student is placed very much at the centre of the learning process, and presented with greater independence in decisions relating to his or her learning (hence the term ‘learner independence’). A key role of the tutor is to facilitate and support the learning process to provide students with opportunities to work collaboratively in order to pool their collective knowledge and understanding, as they work together to create new knowledge for  particular purposes.

In summary then, EBL can be thought of as a broad umbrella term that:

• describes a range of approaches to teaching and learning;
• is guided by a process of supportive enquiry;
• is structured to foster learner independence through active (and usually collaborative) engagement with relevant and meaningful problems and issues.

The University's "Vision for Learning" identifies the impact of enquiry-based approaches on students' learning.