INFORMATION NOW

• Higher Education institutions that are succeeding in Internet-supported Learning have strong motivations to do so.
• Institutions successful with Internet-supported learning have a strong commitment to the initiative.
• Successful institutions measure themselves in a variety of ways depending on what is important to them; quality is at least or more important than growth (atudent outcomes, student satisfaction, growth in enrollments, and faculty satisfaction).
• Students and faculty are well-supported at successful institutions through a set of well established capabilities that are being constantly improved.
• The secret sauce of achieving success in Internet-supported learning varies from institution to institution, however, a programmatic approach with a commitment to fully online programs seems to be most critical.
• Institutions successful in Internet-supported learning have gone beyond the technical issues and are much more focused on achieving a better educational product.
• The greatest challenges by far concerned the development and delivery of effective online learning materials and environments.
• The successful institutions are addressing strategic, cultural and process issues that will help them perform their mission more effectively in the future no matter what direction technology takes."

Please find some time to at least read section one (Executive Summary of Findings), and then perhaps select what you find is most useful for your area of specialization or work. If you ask me what you should focus on (if not all) I would recommend you to read or browse through the following sections (in other words all , except the introduction sections):

• Motivations for Moving Online (Section VII)
• The Role of Leadership (Section VIII)
• Measures of Success and Expectations (Section IX)
• Student and Faculty Support (Section X)
• Delivery Format (Section XI)
• Best Practices and Innovations (Section XII)
• Challenges (Section XIII)
• Future Priorities and Expectations (Section XIV)
• Action Recommendations: Where Do You Go From Here? (Section XV)
• Perspectives on Adoption: Some Ideas to Consider (Section XVI)

Although this research is mostly based on higher education in the USA (21 institutions), it is of great value to us (or anyone involved with education), as they are still the benchmark when it comes to online learning or e-learning. Also, this paper was published on February 1st 2005, which makes it really hot; "straight out of the oven".

Link to article (By Kelly Bruning)
"The role of critical thinking and reflective learning in the online environment is paramount. Critical thinking is the process of taking learned theory and applying them in practice. This requires cognitive skills that require the learner to think of ways to take the concepts learned and apply them.

Critical thinking assignments provide an opportunity for learners to apply knowledge to practical application. Online instructors have the responsibility of providing this opportunity for educational growth to learners and must become creative in developing assignments and projects that foster that growth (extracted highlights jumbled together)."

"Northwestern Michigan College has a campus-wide movement incorporate five core general education learning outcomes in all classes. They are summarized as follows:

• The ability to problem solve.
• The ability to communicate to with other learners.
• The ability to use the English language in communication.
• The ability to read and summarize.
• The ability to apply critical thinking concepts to course concepts."

Overall, this article focuses on the importance of embedding reflection, interaction (student-student, student-instructor, learning communities), problem-solving activities, and feedback into the online learning environment to raise learning to higher levels of critical reflective thinking, and to enhance the quality and effectiveness of online learning.

The real question is how much critical thinking and reflective learning do you apply to your studies?

Although, the lecturer or online instructor has the responsibility of providing such a conducive environment, dont depend on it, and instead be proactive and apply it to everything you learn. With a bit of spice and creativity you can apply these two core elements to your studies, and become a true problem-solver and thinker, which Malaysia increasingly needs .

This All-In-One search tool enables you to access several I-always-use sites (to find stuff) from one site, which currently include Reference.com family, Google, Wikipedia, Acrnonym Finder, Urban Dictionary, SparkNotes, NCSU, and unitconversion (Hopefully Answers.com and other juicy search sites could be added to the list soon). Since the search fields on Schoolr are linked directly to the sites they represent, it should not be difficult to add more (Though, information overload might kick-in).

Better yet, why not create a tool that enables us to add whatever tools we want to use for online researching (By the way the r in Schoolr stands for research), providing us the flexibility to access all our personal favorite juicy research tools from one site, saving us precious time. To add spice to it, we are able to see statistics on which research tools are mostly used, and who are using what, and the different combinations (on one site) used by anyone (according to the users preferences), including gurus like Joseph Hart, Jay Cross, and Jane Knight (who linked me to this tool). For information overload geeks like me, I would like to see all these research tools search at once, meaning that we only need to enter once (one entry field only, saving us more precious time) with checkboxes to the research tools (and the ability to add new checkboxes as we discover), and then the window will split into 2,4,6, 8 or more smaller windows (depending upon your selected checkboxes), enabling us to multi-task between all the juice (or summarize the findings using some Artificial Intelligence and/or Fuzzy logic). Enough!!!!

In addition, there are surely many other things we could do to spice up and make this great initiative more crispy and delicious.

Actually (I am no programmer, so please ignore the rest of this post if it does not make sense), the technology behind this tool is not spectacular, but the idea is creative and innovative (Respect!). As far as I understand (after watching the Channel News video. Yeah, I liked the Chicken Little promotion method, too!), it all came about when one whizz kid (founder) simply got fed up going to all these sites to do his online researching and solved his problem by creating Schoolr (all-in-one), and by doing so he has actually made our research life easier (if we use it, too).

So, if you are fed up, got a problem, or frustrated with something?

Please, remember that problems and frustrations are great opportunities to discover, invent, create, innovate,change the world, become famous, and make big bucks :)