Intute Information

The Intute: Virtual Training Suite is a national Internet service provided by the Intute (formerly the RDN) and funded by JISC (an agency of The Higher and Further Education Funding Councils of England, Scotland and Wales). The service offers over 60 free, online tutorials teaching Internet skills for different subjects, and is free to access via the Web. It is run by the Institute for Learning and Research Technology at the University of Bristol (UK), though the content has been written by a distributed team of tutors, lecturers and librarians from across the country (see the list of authors). This means you can tap into expertise across the country, to develop your Internet skills! Who is it for? The tutorials have been designed for different audiences. Some are designed for students and staff in universities or colleges, some are for adult and community learners so they differ slightly, but they are all free for anyone to use . You can use them to "teach yourself" by working through them in your own time. However, they are also designed to be a flexible eLearning resource that can be easily adopted by tutors, lecturers and librarains in a wide range of courses. (The "For Tutors" link leads to some practical ideas for lessons and class exercises). The tutorials designed specifically for adult and community learners are:Internet for Arts and CraftsInternet for Digital PhotographyInternet for GardeningInternet for Health and Well-beingInternet for Job SearchingWhat does it cover? The service aims to teach Internet research skills for the different subject areas. All the tutorials have the same learning objectives and structure, it's just the subject examples that differ. There are four main sections:TOUR: the best of the Web for the subjectDISCOVER: how to search the InternetJUDGE: which websites are worth usingSUCCESS: stories to inspire youBy the end of a tutorial you should be better able to use the Internet to locate, evaluate and use Internet resources to support your education and research. How do they work? You can choose to work through the 4 main sections in turn, or jump to the one that interests them most. Each section starts with the learning objectives for the section. It then offers a step-by-step guide to the topic, with quizzes and interactive exercises to lighten the learning experience. To work through all the sections takes around 1-2 hours, though we expect people may do one chunk at a time over more than one sitting. There are some special features, such as the Links Basket, which enables you to collect your own list of useful Web links to take away.