Boris and Barclays' mammoth bike scheme in the capital may be getting all the column inches, but on university campuses across the country, fleets of bikes are already available for hire, and from September the concept will be shifting up a gear.

Schemes in Leeds and York – which offer university students and staff cheap bike hire for up to nine months at a time – are already well-established and growing in scale, and next month will be rolled out to campuses in Lincoln, Nottingham and Lancaster. The Nottingham project will start out with 460 bikes, with plans to increase this number next year.

But it is the new venture in Newcastle that really catches the eye. Start-up WhipBikes, the brainchild of Robert Grisdale and Jack Payne, two former civil engineering students, takes the concept to the next level with a 24-hour-a-day, mobile phone-operated "green bike" scheme.

The number of schools using plagiarism-detecting computer software to catch A-level students cheating in their coursework has rocketed, amid warnings that children as young as 11 need to be taught not to copy and paste from the internet.

Nearly 90 schools and more than 130 colleges now use the Turnitin database to cross-check pupils' work with material found online – double the numbers two years ago.

Barry Calvert, of nLearning, which provides the software, said sixth-form heads believed young people needed to be tutored as early as year 7 in how to formally credit and reference sources, rather than just taking chunks of text off the internet and passing it off as their own.

It is no secret that skills shortages are a threat to the UK economy: professions reliant on maths, science and engineering graduates frequently struggle to find qualified candidates. Nowhere is the shortfall more acute than in IT, where BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT (formerly the British Computer Society) is warning of a crisis.

The IT workforce is set to grow at four times the rate of other professions, mainly in the creation of skilled jobs, until 2018. Yet already 43 per cent of employers report a lack of candidates. Together with telecoms, computing has the biggest strategic significance of any sector for the UK’s economic future. But with an ageing workforce and a dire shortage of new entrants to the profession, jobs are being outsourced to India and elsewhere.

When student Richard Newman found a Monopoly sticker on his McDonald's meal, he had no idea what it was.

So the 35-year-old simply threw it away, not realising it was the rarest sticker in the game - and it could have won him half a million pounds.

The PhD philosophy student and his girlfriend collected the Mayfair card when they bought burgers and french fries at a drive-thru McDonalds.

Not knowing it was for the Easy Win Monopoly game, they stuck it to his car steering wheel, and later threw it away.

Geology students at the Open University no longer have to wait for boxes of rocks to be sent to their homes so they can examine their structure. Since February they have been able to use a virtual microscope instead.

The university has always pioneered the use of new technologies to teach. First it was television. The initial university broadcast went out on BBC2 on Sunday, January 3, 1971.

It was a welcome to students called Open Forum and was followed by the first course-related programme, Mathematics: an introduction.

A recent survey has discovered a sharp national increase of 22% on student accommodation payments since 2006-07.

The review, undertaken NUS and Unipol Student Homes, reveals an unprecedented increase – a rental rise 13% above the average rate of inflation. The report released this month expresses both the concern at the snowballing rental costs and what needs to be done. Wes Streeting, president of NUS concludes a gloomy prospect for students should the rise be allowed to continue, “Students are already graduating with tens of thousands of pounds of debt, and soaring accommodation costs will only make the situation worse. With graduate job prospects at an all time low, things are looking very bleak for many students.”

Come September students could be facing higher interest rates on their loans.

On 1st September the Student Loans Company will reset the interest rate payable and this is based on the Retail Prices Index (RPI) rate of inflation in March.

Obviously the recent rise in RPI to 4.4% in March means that students should expect to see an increase from the current rate of interest they are paying on loans.

There are different rules used to set interest rates depending on when the loan was taken out. Interest rates on loans taken out before 1998 are set based on RPI in March. However, interest rates on loans taken out after 1998 are set based on RPI in March or the Bank of England Base Rate (0.5%) plus 1%, depending on which is lower.

It is the academic equivalent of "phone a friend". Students are being sold foolproof dissertations written for them with a cashback guarantee if they fail to get at least a 2:1 degree.

Instead of burning the midnight oil, all the students have to do is put the cost on their credit card. The company selling the service also says its contributors can ghost-write a first-class version of the essay for £1,440. An MA dissertation will cost up to £15,000.

The offers by the website UK Essays.com are the latest evidence of the growth of "essay mills", widely condemned as cheating aids. The firms claim they do not encourage dishonesty and say they tell students to use the essays as a "resource" and not hand them in.

An extra 20,000 university places will be available in England this September on science, maths, engineering and technology degree courses, the chancellor Alistair Darling announced in the budget today.

Darling told the Commons that the cost of the "one-off" places would be £270m and would come, in part, from switching resources from existing budgets and higher revenues from taxes on bankers bonuses.

This will ease what has been predicted to be record competition for university places this summer. Applications in February were up almost a fifth on last year, the university admissions service, Ucas, said.

Hundreds of engineering students at Manchester University have become the latest undergraduates to stage a revolt against the poor quality of teaching they receive.

More than 200 have signed a petition against low standards on their course, which have included “tutorials” of more than 150 students taken by one academic and work returned after several months with no marking except one sentence and a tick.

At an angry meeting with senior academics, students have complained that some lecture notes were simply copied from textbooks.