Intranets and Internet Learning Environments

In Chapter 24 of Lee & Owens, the idea of interactivity is established in Internet based learning. Internet training provides many advantages including easy accessibility, cost effectiveness, easy development. What is important to most businesses is that they use something that is already established, and modify it to meet their business needs; no need to reinvent the wheel! There are some differences when it comes to Intranet and Internet based learning. Intranets are internal to an organization, meaning they are protected and have a high level of security requiring users to log on to gain access. The Internet is highly public, accessible by all and is not as easily controlled as a private Intranet. Three primary reasons for the adoption of Intranet and Internet delivery are universal access, ease of use, and multimedia content. As a training designer, my biggest concern when creating a training program would be acquiring the skills necessary to develop something like this and also making sure that the trainees have necessary skills to access it. Also, you must consider the type of information people are able to access (videos or flash) and how fast their connection is to the Internet. I found something really interesting in this chapter because as I have grown up and used technology and heard all the jargon, I never new that the Internet and WWW were not interchangeable terms. The Internet is the backbone, or hardware on which the WWW is accessed. Interesting?!