Basically, it’s a compilation of case studies from 80 or so colleges, each of which has set out along the stony path of “self-improvement”.

Martinez has drawn up a list of improving strategies that worked best - particularly those relating to retention and achievement.

So what are the best ways? I am tempted to sum them up as “traditional methods”, but that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. Rather, what Martinez highlights are the old verities, the things that most teachers know will work by dint of long years of trial and error in the classroom.

Consider some of the items on that list: improving student motivation and providing extra support on top of regular classes. Student-centred learning and tutorial back-up, particularly one-to-one sessions, are also seen as valuable.

As I say, none of this is likely to come as a surprise to those in the field; but just cast your minds back a year or two and recall the brave new world of learning that was being trumpeted then. New technology was the new Jerusalem. Computers were set to take over from teachers. Distance learning would consign the classroom to the scrap heap for ever. At the time, many of us thought that this unbounded enthusiasm for teacherless teaching was really a way of getting learning on the cheap. But there was a hard core who really believed in it. Some of them were even grown-ups. In reality, how have these methods worked? Not very well. Take distance learning for instance. Many colleges put much time and effort - and not a little cash - into setting up open learning units, only to abandon them once it became clear that the results were dismal.

I once taught an evening class for students who were preparing to start their Open University courses. At our initial meeting, I told them which book we would be studying first. A week later they had all bought it, two-thirds had read it and the other third had made a start.

For them the OU’s interlocking network of written units, TV and radio broadcasts and supporting tutorials was likely to work. They were keen, motivated, hungry for knowledge. Many of them had already achieved considerable success in education.

Compare this with my A-level day class at the time. To get them to buy the required texts I practically had to lead them to the bookshop. Actually reading the stuff was another huge effort. “My mum’s read it,” one student helpfully told me three weeks into our study of Othello.

What we still call the “new” technology certainly has a place in the teaching and learning that goes on in colleges. The computer is a great tool - as was the book and the ballpoint pen before it. But it’s not a tutor. Many students now use the Internet as their first resort in the quest for information, but often use it blindly. How much better to learn about sources and their use in a class led by a skilled teacher teasing out the experiences of all students and getting them to collectively reflect on the right and wrong ways of doing it.

Some carping individuals might feel that they could have reached similar conclusions to Martinez without years of officially-sanctioned studies in dozens of colleges. But fortunately, we are still resisting the temptation to say we told you so!