From Leading Edge to Mainstream: The evolving Brighton Business School intranet

The term 'intranet' began to to enter corporate vocabularies around 1995 (van der Linden, 1998). It is used to describe an 'in-house' computer network, normally based on Internet technology, which facilitates information and file sharing within a closed group of used in an educational setting to enhance student access to the range of information relating to their studies. We developed a pilot intranet that was introduced to Brighton Business School in Autumn 1997. After the pilot, we went on to develop a second version using industry-standard software that was released to the school in September 2000. In this chapter we try to convey a sense of the impact that an intranet can have on staff and students. We describe the context into which the School's intranet was first released and compare it with the context in 2001. We trace the changes in the system's conceptual design and the underlying technology. We examine student and staff reaction at the two release dates and the evaluation data gathered then. Finally, we discuss how such a project, in an established school with established learning and teaching methods, can be evaluated.