A Framework for Combining
Knowledge Management and Virtual Education
Sangwon Moon
Professor of Management, Korea National Open University
[Abstract] In general, companies build and exercise their company-specific knowledge management scheme to heighten knowledge sharing and learning among employees. Learning activities, however, are usually limited to fragments of working methods or short pieces of advices. Knowledge management of companies can be greatly enhanced when it is combined with structural course materials produced by or in combination with formal educational institutions. A related framework is presented for creating an industry-academic cooperative knowledge venture.
Need a Paradigm Shift
The high speed with which radical innovations occur has created shorter business cycles – making dynamic utilization of knowledge a crucial factor in remaining competitive. There’s a rapid transition from an industrial society into a knowledge society. Besides knowledge, organizations also need the skills and competencies to dynamically update and put knowledge into practice. This results in the need for organizations to learn continuously and to continuously improve their actions through the acquired knowledge. Hence, organizations should foster the philosophy of the learning organization. Learning should not be abstract but contextual: it should happen just in time on the proper experience so that it can be immediately applied to solving real world problems. In the reverse direction, learning can be seen as the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience.
The list of system elements (for example, communities of practice, corporate university, centers of excellence, knowledge portals) in knowledge management practices has reached a substantial dimension and there is nothing inherently wrong with such lists of recommended tools and general advice. The problem is, however, that such lists are not particularly helpful when system elements are not aligned with the organization and company’s strategy through sound knowledge management system design (Mahnke and Venzin, 2005). We need a fundamental paradigm shift in management education: just-in-time, just enough, and just right education, which is individualized and learner-centered.
Industry-Academic Cooperative Knowledge Venture
A common goal for KMS(Knowledge Management Systems) and ITS(Intelligent Tutoring Systems) is to allow the learner to acquire knowledge; however, the motivation is different for each. The ITS are used for education and industrial training and aim to train future workers by giving them the required formal knowledge. In ITS, the control is assigned to the computer tutor, as the replacement of a human one. This computer tutor has thus to perform the following tasks: monitor the student knowledge, determine the differences between the actual student knowledge and the reference model, and transfer the new knowledge. The KMS are used in organizations to create, improve, or upgrade products and services. The KMS aim to help workers to react knowledgeably in a specific situation. KMS suppose that an employee already possesses some initial required knowledge.
There are different types of knowledge, i.e., tacit and explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge, on the one hand, refers to the formal, systematic knowledge, the rules and procedures that an organization follows. This kind of knowledge can be transferred and therefore can be a subject of education and socialization. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, is mainly based on lived experiences and therefore is difficult to identify and to transfer. Deeply rooted in a specific context, it refers to personal qualities such as cognitive and technical elements inherent to the individual. KMS work with tacit as well as explicit knowledge. Best Practice Replication(eBPR) is Ford Motor Company’s proprietary process, with an accompanying intranet website that collects, distributes, and tracks the value of replicating better ways of doing business across the enterprise. Ford’s Best Practice Replication Web site currently contains more than 2,800 proven practices, and 25 communities have recorded 16,000 plus replications over the last three years (Wolford and Kwiecien, 2004).
At Cisco, e-learning is Web-enabled communication, collaboration, learning, knowledge transfer, and training … with the end goal resulting in positive impact on the learner and the business (Kelly and Bauer, 2004). The web is central to most corporate and academic educational experiments. Often, companies start by offering some part of the educational process themselves, but, companies organize the learning process differently than universities. Within a corporate setting, education is much more skill-based and problem/solution oriented. Corporate learning tends to be learner-centered, but relatively weak in the content part of the courses. Universities, however, remain organized in functional areas, so courses offered by open learning in universities follow this functional subdivision. The knowledge content of each individual course is therefore stronger, but the overall programs often lack integration and a clear focus on managerial competencies. Some of the techniques used in these innovative programs are focused on the company’s issues and bottom-line goals, action-learning inside projects, mentor programs, and self-teaching and learning through group activities. Faculty from business schools and experts in the field act in these programs in a variety of roles: internal consultants, teachers, project supervisors, program designers, liaisons between the company and the providers, and program coordinators. Together with faculty, company leaders and speakers run sessions and real-life business cases. This trend not only enhances content and delivery, but many companies find it a better fit with career development and an overall training path or development strategy, strategic change, and organizational growth processes (Baets and Linden, 2003). In addition, it offers more flexibility. As there’s no single business school that is strong in every field of expertise, it enables companies to look for the individual professors and experts that fit the company’s needs or industry, and work directly with them. Last, there’s also the plus of lower cost. Specific modules from one program, for example, can be redesigned and used in another training and development path. This explains the possibility that some of the more innovative programs are found not in business schools, but rather within the corporate institute environment.
l ITS for Medium or Small-sized Companies
Companies not big or capable enough to keep and run their own ITS can resort to making alliance with an educational institution which is able to leverage its own educational contents as well as those created by other institutions in serving multiple customers. An open university like KNOU can assume the role of creator, collector, distributor, and operator of such connected educational network. Mass-individualization, in the context of a degree program, can best be realized through a personal learning contract between the learner and the school. An in-company project can be used as an efficient medium for a personal learning contract. The learner enters the course on the condition that he bases this learning on a project that he or she engages in throughout the duration of the course, where a faculty member guides the learner through the database of material. Those parts of the pedagogical database which form the best input for the project are studied at the particular moment that the learner needs to know the information. Thus, working on a real project in the organization of the participant, project based learning often makes a direct business contribution and provides an immediate financial return to that organization (Baets and Linden, 2003).
In recent years, there has been an explosion of interest in reusable multimedia components for learning, referred to as ‘learning objects’. The use of learning objects promises to increase the effectiveness of learning by making content more readily available, by reducing the cost and effort of producing quality content, and by allowing content to be more easily shared (Lytras and Naeve, 2006).
Architecture
Let’s discuss combining the KMS and ITS in terms of their building blocks. What are the components to be included within the architecture? First, a number of internal and external information sources which will constitute the database framework are to be included. Electronic libraries containing reference material and articles in an electronic, browsable, and searchable format, or general information sources, or databases of partner organizations and alliances can be linked or made accessible. As a consequence, information filtering and dedicated search engines will be central to the effectiveness of the platform. It might be interesting as well to link some specific, but more detailed courses that allow students to explore further any particular area of interest. Second, collaborative tools, communication technologies, content management, virtual learning technologies, portal management and management reporting solutions, learning management system, and pedagogical technologies represent the main building blocks of the architecture. Last, the selected components, modalities, and functionalities are to be linked around the Hybrid Business School core engine. This engine guarantees nonlinear dynamic and flexible, contextualized and individualized learning through its matching function. As previously described, an individual learner’s curriculum based on previous knowledge and experience, and present job function and roles is created dynamically and automatically structured and delivered as learning content, in the appropriate form, to the learner. The learner’s performance and progress are then continuously assessed and tracked, the results are processed to adjust the learner’s profile.
l User Adaptability
Two main concerns for e-commerce are personalization and enhancement of user experience. Personalization addresses the ability to offer content tailored to the preferences of each user or user group. Preferences may be explicitly declared by the user, or derived by the system through inspecting user interaction; if the system dynamically reacts to changes of visitor behavior, it is termed as adaptive. Personalization allows customers to focus on the items they are interested in, and enables electronic shops to make targeted suggestions and send promotions to customers (Lepouras and Vassilakis, 2006). Most of the systems are not adapting to the learner, so the learner has to spend a lot of time before reaching the learning goal that is suitable for him or her. To overcome these difficulties, we have to design an e-learning system that will be adapted to the learner’s ICT level and knowledge. Paraskevi and Kollias(2006) suggests an approach based on the usage of electronic questionnaires (e-questionnaires) that are designed by experts and aim to detect the learner’s ICT level and learning preferences prior to the learning experience as well as after its completion. The primary aim of this questionnaire is to allow for the learners of the characteristic sample to be divided into groups of learners, with learners of each group displaying similar learning behaviors.
l Standardization of Learning Material
The advent of networking, and in particular of the Web, made possible the interconnection of e-learning systems, thus giving birth to a common knowledge space to be accessed and used possibly by a plethora of such systems as well as a wide variety of their users (experts building knowledge bases, teachers editing appropriate courseware modules, and students undergoing particular e-classes). The most prominent issues to be solved in a distributed domain are: e-learning systems’ interoperability, information overloading of users, and reuse of (already developed) domain knowledge bases (Lytras and Naeve, 2006). An essential challenge for the e-learning community has been how to represent online learning material in a standardized manner to realize effortless interoperability and knowledge reuse. Researchers have proposed that the educational content in an e-learning environment should be oriented around small learning objects coupled with associated metadata and semantics. With the ability of representing semantics of knowledge resources and their relationships in a standard format, the Semantic Web appears to be a promising technology for implementing e-learning. By dividing learning materials into small pieces of semantically annotated learning objects, courses in a Semantic Web-based e-learning system can be easily customized by organizing learning objects based on the user’s need.
Academic Institution’s Role Revisited
The most likely evolution is that business schools will offer knowledge to companies in a flexible, hybrid way using technology. This fits the virtual business school approach combined with the companies’ own knowledge management effort. Ideally, business schools and companies will cooperate in the implementation of the overall concept of virtual education and knowledge management. The more closely the bases of management education and the knowledge base are connected, the more value it will add to the company. Business schools are expected to feed their newly arranged contents into the company ITS or use them to educate their own students who come from medium or small-sized companies.
How to customize the learning content based on learners’ need, however, is still a challenge for current e-learning applications. In spite of evident gains in using ITS within the learning and teaching process, there are still difficulties concerning high system development and maintenance costs, and lack of interoperability. An infrastructure is highly desired for creating machine-understandable, sharable, and reusable learning content. So far, the research on semantics-supported e-learning is still at its infancy (Lytras and Naeve, 2006). First, for any given domain, different experts may disagree on what the correct ontology should be. In some domains, ontologies change quickly over time as the fields develop. Second, approaches to combining the Semantic Web and Web Service technologies to allow dynamic discovery of learning objects and composition of new courses should be developed. How to use the Semantic Web technology to enable personalized and context-aware adaptive e-learning will be a challenging goal.
References
Baets, W.R.J. and G. van der Linden, Virtual Corporate Universities, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003
Kelly, T.M. and D.K. Bauer, “Managing Inyellectual Capital – via E-Learning – at Cisco”, in Handbook on Knowledge Management, Springer-Verlag, 2004, Vol.2: 511-532
Lepouras, G. and C. Vassilakis, “Adaptive Virtual Reality Shopping Mall”, in Encyclopedia of E-Commerce, E-Government, and Mobile Commerce, Idea Group Reference, 2006, Vol.1: 1-6
Lytras, M.D. and A. Naeve, Intelligent Learning Infrastructure for Knowledge Intensive Organizations, Information Science Publishing, 2006
Mahnke, V. and M. Venzin, “Designing Integrated Knowledge Management Systems in the Multinational Corporation”, in Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital, Palgrave MacMillan, 2005, 173-194.
Paraskevi, T. and S. Kollias, “E-Questionnaire for Innovative Adaptive-Learning Scheme”, in Encyclopedia of E-Commerce, E-Government, and Mobile Commerce, Idea Group Reference, 2006, Vol.1: 445-450
Wolford, D. and S. Kwiecien, “Driving Knowledge Management at Ford Motor Company”, in Handbook on Knowledge Management, Springer-Verlag, 2004, Vol.2: 501-510