Technology and Products Supporting E-learning by Knowledge Management - A Review

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to distinguish and describe knowledge management (KM) technologies according to their support for strategy.Design/methodology/approachThis study employed an ontology development method to describe the relations between technology, KM and strategy, and to categorize available KM technologies according to those relations. Ontologies are formal specifications of concepts in a domain and their inter‐relationships, and can be used to facilitate common understanding and knowledge sharing. The study focused particularly on two sub‐domains of the KM field: KM strategies and KM technologies.Findings”KM strategy” has three meanings in the literature: approach to KM, knowledge strategy, and KM implementation strategy. Also, KM technologies support strategy via KM initiatives based on particular knowledge strategies and approaches to KM. The study distinguishes three types of KM technologies: component technologies, KM applications, and business applications. They all can be described in terms of ”creation” and ”transfer” knowledge strategies, and ”personalization” and ”codification” approaches to KM.Research limitations/implicationsThe resulting framework suggests that KM technologies can be analyzed better in the context of KM initiatives, instead of the usual approach associating them with knowledge processes. KM initiatives provide the background and contextual elements necessary to explain technology adoption and use.Practical implicationsThe framework indicates three alternative modes for organizational adoption of KM technologies: custom development of KM systems from available component technologies; purchase of KM‐specific applications; or purchase of business‐driven applications that embed KM functionality. It also lists adequate technologies and provides criteria for selection in any of the cases.Originality/valueAmong the many studies analyzing the role of technology in KM, an association with strategy has been missing. This paper contributes to filling this gap, integrating diverse contributions via a clearer definition of concepts and a visual representation of their relationships. This use of ontologies as a method, instead of an artifact, is also uncommon in the literature.

Knowledge Management Research & Practice (2009) 7, 192–195. doi:10.1057/kmrp.2009.20 This special issue on Knowledge Management and e-Research Technologies aims to provide a distinctive perspective on the role of technology in knowledge work. We begin with the assumption that today’s knowledge work and research practice is increasingly mediated by a diversity of tools which may not traditionally be labelled as knowledge management technologies (Hendriks, 2001; Butler, 2002), but which are embedded within knowledge work practices. Although many have criticised the idea of formal knowledge management technology (Swan et al., 1999; Galliers & Newell, 2001; Hislop, 2002), it is highly apparent that contemporary knowledge work is facilitated using information and communications technologies (ICTs) of various types from the ‘macro’ knowledge management systems that have been heavily criticised to the more ‘micro’ emerging technologies that we may not traditionally associate with the term knowledge management technology. This special issue, therefore, returns to the debate on the role of technology within knowledge creation, dissemination and use, but explores this with a specific focus on the how new, flexible ICTs are emerging, which blur the boundary between technology and social knowledge practices. Within knowledge management theory, it is possible to observe two broad and enduring perspectives towards technology (elaborated persuasively and famously by Hansen et al. (1999) but also by Alavi & Leidner (2001); Schultze & Stabell (2004)) between those who seek to catalogue and capture knowledge within computer systems, believing knowledge as capable of objective representation and is therefore capable of codification (Schultze, 1998), and those who believe knowledge to be inherently tacit and social, and who argue technology’s role is to support collaboration (Schultze, 1998). Both perspectives seem much evident in literature on Knowledge Management Systems, which frequently adopts a view of ‘knowledge management’ through the management of either catalogued, codified, data or of collaborative, social relationships. These two perspectives of codification or collaboration have, however, created, in our opinion, an unhelpful dichotomy and instrumentalisation of ‘knowledge management technology’ (Mitev & Venters, 2009) leading to polarised literature of either codification technology or collaborative systems. This special issue thus seeks to present articles that will stimulate the debate on the interrelationship and connection between technology aiming to codify knowledge and that aimed at collaboration. Our argument is founded on the observation that human action is mediated by tools, in a myriad of forms, which have a materiality to us and form part of our ongoing practice (Orlikowski, 2007; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). That knowledge is socially constructed through social interaction is Knowledge Management Research & Practice (2009) 7, 192–195 & 2009 Operational Research Society. All rights reserved 1477–8238/09

Knowledge management (KM) is currently an important driver to develop dynamic capabilities for businesses, on behalf of competitiveness. Nonetheless, some critical success factors are hampering KM implementation, such as a lack of a KM strategy, cultural aspects, leadership, and technology. In this paper, we focused on the KM implementation within Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) by exploring Participatory Design potential to KM implementation in SMEs, by focusing on information technology as a critical success factor and exploring some organizational culture characteristics that can help in this context. To achieve this goal, we conducted an ethnographic study in the real environment of a consulting firm which is starting its own KM project. Our results show that Participatory Design might be recommended to SMEs’ KM implementation, by taking advantage of already available, but underused technological tools.

PurposePublic crisis often generates new knowledge that should be incorporated into a government’s macro-control to ensure the relief supply. From the perspective of public crisis knowledge management, the Chinese system of Government relief supplies can be considered as a special case of the knowledge system. This paper aims to investigate the supply and production mechanism of relief goods and explore the advantages of the Chinese system when a sudden public crisis occurs.Design/methodology/approachUnder the Chinese system, the authors construct a relief supply chain model consisting of the Chinese Government, one manufacturer and one supplier, where the supplier has no capital constraints. Given the demand for relief goods, the government purchases from the manufacturer with a guide price. Then, the manufacturer decides on its order quantity and offers a wholesale price to the supplier. The supplier has a random capacity and decides on the level of knowledge acquisition to improve its capacity.FindingsThe authors first obtain the analytical solution for the manufacturer to motivate a high level of knowledge acquisition from the supplier. Specifically, the manufacturer’s optimal order quantity is equal to the demand and the optimal wholesale price has a cost-plus form that reimburses the supplier for its production cost and knowledge-acquisition cost. Next, the authors derive the optimal guide price for the government, which should be set to subsidize the manufacturer with a proportion of the sourcing cost. Finally, the authors compare the Chinese system with the market mechanism where the supplier has capital constraints and confirm that the Chinese system is more beneficial to both the manufacturer and the government.Originality/valueQuantitative research on the Chinese system of Government relief supplies is difficult to be conducted. This paper provides feasible and practical methods to quantify the benefits of the Chinese system. The results reveal that the Chinese system is an effective mechanism of public crisis knowledge management, which can be helpful to the government’s policy-making in practice.

Among the many technologies that support knowledge management, electronic learning or e‐learning has become as popular as business intelligence. Along with the rapid development of modern communications and information technology and the increasing demand for building and maintaining business continuity capabilities, e‐learning has emerged into a viable solution for continuous, on‐demand training and organizational learning. It becomes critical for organizations to design and develop an effective e‐learning system by using well‐researched theories and technologies that fit their organizational environment. As we discovered in our study, a successful e‐learning system is supported by many critical success factors (CSFs), and technology is the key factor among the CSFs. We also conducted a comparative study on e‐learning theories, technologies and products from the perspectives of both western practitioners and Chinese counterparts. Due to the rapid economic development in China and its fast adoption of communications and information technology, the ways Chinese practitioners are developing e‐learning theories, technologies and products have inevitably become a focal point in the world of information technology. Through the analysis of the current e‐learning technologies and products, we outline the trends of developing e‐learning systems and emphasize the importance of proper theories in guiding e‐learning systems development. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the efficacy of knowledge management (KM) based systems and best practices that could be used to address operational issues in the oil and gas sector.Design/methodology/approachGiven little was known empirically about the strategies and practices which contribute to improved performance, innovation and continuous improvement in the oil and gas sector qualitative method was used. Semi-structured interviews were used to derive senior managers’ constructs of project delivery efficiency and KM based systems. The interviews were analysed through the use of a qualitative analysis software package NUDIST NVivoTM. Participants were selected using purposive sampling. Validity and reliability were achieved by first assessing the plausibility in terms of already existing knowledge on some of the operational issues raised by participants.FindingsThese were synthesised into a framework capturing seven well-defined stages. All these steps emerged as being related; they are comprised of independent variables. These steps were found to comprise of knowledge management technology approaches, knowledge management people approaches, KM strategies and value enhancing practices.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the findings are pertinent to oil and gas organisations, it will be important to conduct follow-up research validating the potential for using the results of this study to establish frameworks for knowledge and information management in different organisations and contexts. This will provide not only data about the validity of the framework in generic terms but will also generate additional data on the application of KM strategy.Practical implicationsAs shown in this study, successful KM based systems requires the aligning of business strategy, technology for KM, project management operations with an enterprise knowledge-sharing culture. Such sharing requires managing the behaviour of project personnel such that knowledge transfer becomes part of the organisation’s norm.Social implicationsThe implementation of KM based systems requires deliberate planning and action to create the conditions for success and put in place the strategy, leadership, goals, process, skills, systems, issue resolution, and structure to direct and exploit the dynamic nature of project work. The strategies proposed in this research cannot be expected to resolve all KM issues in the oil and gas sector. However, their use defines an approach that is superior to the traditional approaches typically adopted and consequently merits far wider application.Originality/valueThe proposed framework presents a better way of optimising the performance of project-based operations thus enabling oil and gas organisations to reform their poor performance on projects and empower them to better manage emerging cultural challenges in their future projects. Reflecting on their experiences, the participants confirmed that the proposed KM framework and its seven well-defined stages were central to the effectiveness of KM in oil and gas operations. Although the scope of this research was restricted to projects in Nigeria and the UK, the geographical focus of this research does not invalidate these results with respect to other countries. The fact is that the oil and gas sector globally shares some common fundamental characteristics.

Knowledge Management (KM) is an important issue in the 21st century and its execution has become a necessary process for enterprises to reach a level of sustainable development. Enterprises should value their own KM activities and accomplish the goal of sustainable operation through the promotion of effective KM activities. This research studies the impact of the critical success factors of KM on the implementation of KM activities, and its impact on new product development performance. The two intermediate variables, industry groups and the enterprise scales, are considered. After reviewing the literature, this research developed a theoretical model of the factors influencing these relationships. The research results found that the executive degree of critical KM success factors (five dimensions) revealed a significant influence on the executive degree of KM activities. The executive degree of KM activities also revealed a significant impact on new product development performance. As to the intermediate variables of industry groups and enterprise scales, this research proved that industry groups and the enterprise scales do not have any significant influence on the executive degree of KM activities or the new product development performance.

With the rapid development of network technology, online sharing of teaching resources has gained widespread attention in the educational field. This sharing not only provides educators and learners with rich learning resources but also opens up new channels for knowledge innovation and dissemination. However, it remains a major challenge to efficiently manage, allocate, and evaluate these resources. Existing research methods often rely too heavily on traditional knowledge management theories and overlook the characteristics of online environments. This research aimed to study and propose a new online sharing mechanism for teaching resources from the perspective of knowledge management. This study provided a new theoretical framework and practical strategy for online sharing of teaching resources by completing the knowledge management system based on the TransCat model, introducing the online sharing algorithm of Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN), and using the resource effectiveness evaluation considering knowledge potential differences.

Higher education, as a service sector, offers various programs to develop the students which can add value to the society. People, knowledge and technology play vital roles in attaining high service delivery in higher education institutions (HEIs). Knowledge sharing (KS), which is an arm of knowledge management (KM), is a key factor in HEIs requires full usage of technology to disseminate knowledge from teaching and researches through e-learning. However, technology challenges are prevalent in Africa. Hence, this paper illustrates how e-learning system can be used to enhance KM in HEIs in Africa and provide the benefits of both. Characteristics of KM and e-learning system have been highlighted. The paper shows relationship among different types of KM, e-learning and blended e-learning (BEL). It has been enumerated that there is a meeting point between KM, e-learning and BEL towards enhanced service delivery in HEIs in Africa in the era of open distance learning for towards achieving mass education. Hence, African governments should step up their efforts in funding technology-enhanced training in HEIs and necessary policies to promote effective and efficient quality services in DL education using KM and BEL.

Academic research in Knowledge and knowledge management tends to focus on issues related to producing, storing, organizing, sharing, and retrieving data, information, and knowledge for and from humans, and on how to make use of machines for those and other related purposes. Therefore, hardware and software are usually seen more as support and means but, as technology exponentially evolves, there are already many machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence, and other resources where it is hard for a human mind to fully comprehend the rationale behind its outcomes, results, predictions, processing, or decisions taken, even though they might be shown to be precise and of high quality. There are theoretical e technical efforts to address it, such as the concept of Explainable AI, but it is conceivable that knowledge from machines may not be, in the present or in the future, both efficient and adequately translatable to traditional human-comprehensive knowledge. That knowledge might one day be only usable by other machines in a yet unknown approach of knowledge sharing between them, in a specific way designed for them and perhaps, in the future, also by them: a machine perspective of knowledge and knowledge management. In addition, machine knowledge may not be available only in the explicit form but also in a manner somehow analog to human tacit knowledge, as for instance, a given AI may acquire a rationale that is beyond what its stored bytes can express. That might be also evidence of a context in which perhaps it may be only able to be socialized between machines, in a tacit to tacit “transfer”, not with nor for humans. Furthermore, keeping machine knowledge secure might be far more complex than mere data storage security and policy, as a simple copy of those data may be insufficient for representing and recovering a previously developed machine knowledge, implying that traditional information management is no longer enough. Much is still needed to advance on the topic of machine knowledge, as an approach to data, information, and knowledge from and for machines is needed, in what could be called machine knowledge management (MKM). But that is not the final step needed, as from these machine knowledge and knowledge management concepts emerge the need for a unified theory with human counterparts, that addresses the complex aspects of coexistence and interactions of both clusters of knowledge, with implications for Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT), and how both can work together in the present and future challenges. Therefore, the aim of this research is to advance toward the proposal of a theoretical model for machine knowledge and knowledge management, on how that can be integrated with the analog human versions in a unified human-machine model, and what might play the mediator role. Subsidiarily, it also discusses the need for a standardized and expanded concept of information and knowledge consistent with that model. Finally, topics are proposed for future research agenda. To achieve these research goals, the main methodologies adopted were the literature review and the grounded theory.

Student learning and how their lessons are delivered have been dramatically changed by COVID-19 pandemic, as evidenced by the widespread utilization of e-learning systems when the pandemic hit. However, the use of e-learning among students worldwide has not been as effective. The e-learning systems success model after the pandemic should be revised. This study examined the role of monitoring quality to validate the e-learning systems success using previous e-learning and information systems success models. Structural equation model was used in data analysis, involving data obtained from 800 students. Results demonstrated positive impacts of information quality, system quality and service quality, on user satisfaction, and positive impact of system use of user on student satisfaction and consequently on student loyalty. Monitoring quality did not show a positive impact on user satisfaction. Significant impact of user satisfaction on learning effectiveness was also shown. This study showed some significant implications for e-learning systems success models both in theory and in practice.

Purpose – Guidelines for the design of knowledge-based e-learning usability systems are absent from the current recognized set of usability design heuristics and from an established evaluation methodology of e-learning system developments. Such systems can help Web designers and instructional designers design for different user needs and decide which properties are of a higher priority, thus meriting more design and development efforts. The authors aim to help students develop higher-order thinking skills, such as application, evaluation and syntheses of knowledge. Design/methodology/approach – The authors applied Merrill ' s first principles of instruction and usability properties as pedagogical and usability design guidelines, knowledge management (KM) and hierarchical task analysis as methodological knowledge bases. The authors proposed a KM e-learning usability framework which frames our mapping of Web usability attributes to e-learning usability properties. The authors aim to investigate whether adopting Merrill ' s first principles of instruction and usability properties as knowledge-based guidelines/design factors would help learners develop higher-order thinking skills and whether this design would result in positive technology acceptance. The authors also developed a method matrix to map the selected methods of cognitive engineering to its potential uses in the KM e-learning usability framework of this paper and mapped e-learning usability tools with components in the KM e-learning usability system. Findings – Findings indicated that our design effectively helped learners to demonstrate higher-order thinking skills and positive technology acceptance, promising indications toward the design and development of knowledge-based usability frameworks and systems. Research/limitations/implications – The sample size of this paper is small. Hence, conclusions are not generalizable at this moment. Originality/Value – The authors’ contributions are twofold: First, the authors proposed a KM e-learning usability framework, which frames the mapping of KM processes to e-learning principles and usability properties. Second, the authors proposed a method matrix which maps the selected methods of cognitive engineering to its potential uses in their KM e-learning usability framework. Based on these mappings and focusing on the usability properties navigation and learning support, the authors used ICT/Web2.0 tools to present/visualize information more clearly and more sensibly/manageably to students, to help trigger new knowledge and develop higher-order thinking skills, such as application, evaluation and syntheses of knowledge and articulate information from different perspectives throughout the KM life cycle.

Due to the knowledge economy is growing so rapidly, the management of the enterprise is also undergoing tremendous changes. Therefore knowledge management is created. As a learning organization to achieve organizational knowledge management is the most effective form of organization, it is bound to become Knowledge Management’s key and core to create a learning organization. A perfect knowledge management chain benefits the knowledge selection, sorting, innovation and the knowledge bank. In this article, strategies of knowledge management for e-commerce were studied in the perspective of knowledge management and learning organization.

In order to solve the physical education strategy problem of mobile digital information technology, a structure analysis and research method of systematic knowledge management department is proposed. First of all, the arrival and continuous maturity of the economic era has provided technical support for the development of many fields, especially the progress of information technology to strengthen the advantages of information management. Now the information management has gradually risen to the development stage of knowledge management. Secondly, there are related group learning and teachers’ personal knowledge management questionnaire survey. The statistical results of 178 valid questionnaires collected showed that 100% of teachers admitted that they had participated in different forms and types of group learning, and 91% of preschool teachers believed that they had a basic fixed time and content of group learning. However, 64.2 percent of teachers admitted that they did not consider personal knowledge management at all. For what is a personal knowledge management, 43.8% of the teachers are only heard of the term “personal knowledge management” but do not know the specific meaning. 17.4% of the teachers had heard of it and knew something about it. Only 3.4% of teachers clearly understood the meaning of personal knowledge management, and 35.4% had never heard of the concept of personal knowledge management, let alone the application of personal knowledge management strategies. The results show that how to excavate the structure of knowledge management of sports subject systematically through the innovation of PE teaching strategy, and excavate tacit knowledge and comprehensive explicit knowledge more deeply is the focus of this study. Therefore, from the perspective of knowledge management, an educational information resource management system is proposed, which can classify subject knowledge effectively and intelligently by means of mobile information technology.

Despite the development of advanced information and knowledge management technologies in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, there is still a missing link between the green building performance evaluation (BPE) domain and the knowledge management system. In the BPE domain, post-occupancy evaluation (POE) has been developed as an effective method to evaluate actual building performance after the building has been occupied for some time. However, the vast POE knowledge is mostly documented in various standardized references with different focuses, and it is time-consuming to manage and acquire scattered and fragmented knowledge data. Ontology, as a semantic web technology, has been widely used in the knowledge representation and management engineering field. Hence, this research integrates ontology into the green building post-occupancy assessment domain to develop a unified semantic model to systematize the fragmented knowledge. The extracted POE knowledge from evaluation standards is formalized into OWL (Ontology Web Language) ontology, which achieves knowledge systematization in the POE domain and enables the knowledge-based application systems to retrieve, share and reuse POE knowledge more effectively.