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Managing The Knowledge Base In Educational Industry

INTRODUCTION

“The basic economic resource is no longer capital, nor natural resources, nor labor.  It is and will be knowledge.”

–

Peter Drucker

 Educational Institutions need to tackle challenges of outdated teaching techniques. Leading education organizations around the world are focused on the concept of sustainable improvement. The primary goal is to create an environment that delivers better learning. A common theme that runs through all strategies for improvement is enhanced communication and collaboration between the important stakeholders groups in the education environment – students, alumni and parents, administrators and teachers. To enable such changes it is essential they create a robust collaborative Knowledge Management system which will be the propelling force that will help them achieve their goals. KM enables timely and effective collaboration on curriculum development, sharing of teaching best practices for benefit of organization, better online tools for managing daily information sharing between students & teachers, Case studies, Research & white papers and etc

 KM METHODOLOGY – Reference to Educational industry [PROCESS]

 Knowledge is what I know;

Information is what we know.

 Interest in knowledge creation within the institution is growing at an astounding rate. The most effective way to create knowledge sharing culture is first to start practice at individual faculty level. Faculty with appropriate knowledge sharing mindset and the appropriate knowledge sharing technology to support them, the two together, will enable the creation of knowledge effectively. Once the knowledge is created, capturing takes place where in the knowledge database is created and all necessary data is been stored in the form of documents, white papers, Research works, Case studies and in various formats to be presented in usable format and there by making use of knowledge in the broader context. Massive amounts of resources on a daily basis will be present in a institution that they must gather, categorize, interpret and disseminate efficiently.

 In certain situations, it can be more than threatening for a faculty to introduce knowledge into systems and actively search out that which others have introduced. It can also require a substantial amount of time and effort. Therefore, faculty needs to be highly motivated in order to undertake such work. It is only when a knowledge manager adopts the principle of knowledge sharing for the whole institution that knowledge is shared and reused spontaneously.

 Knowledge, in addition to being shared between faculties, must be distributed by an institution to its faculty and management community. The dissemination of knowledge has a massive impact on the formation of competitive advantage. It is broadly agreed that in order to ensure the proper dissemination of knowledge it is necessary both to lubricate communication and nurture the right culture in the institution.

 Knowledge, in addition to being shared between faculty members, must be distributed by an institution to its entire faculty community. The dissemination of knowledge has a massive impact on the formation of competitive advantage. Dissemination also requires the transformation of highly individualized tacit knowledge into more widely shared explicit knowledge. It is not the organizations which own the best knowledge that achieve competitive advantage but, rather, those that make the best use of it. In order to make the best use of knowledge it should be fully applied to the activities of the institution and this would require that all the other knowledge processes, namely, creation, dissemination and sharing, should be taking place.

KM STRATEGY- Reference to Educational industry

 “Knowledge Management is the Innovative and Effective Aid to sustain the knowledge of the faculty and students to gain an edge in the industry”

 Developing a knowledge management strategy provides a unique opportunity to gain a greater understanding of the way the institution operates, and the challenges that confront it. By focusing on identifying staff needs and issues, activities and initiatives can be recommended with the confidence that these will have a clear and measurable impact upon the institution. To be successful, a KM strategy must do more than just outline high-level goals such as ‘become a knowledge-enabled institution Instead, the strategy must identify the key needs and issues within the institution, and provide a framework for addressing these.

 Knowledge management strategies and drivers must be reviewed from a human resources perspective. The Faculty development cell assists the leadership of an institution in identifying the sources of the required knowledge and the best way to capture it, as well as assessing mastery of knowledge among employees and determining the benefits of that assessment to the institution. Knowledge management can be considered successful if faculty understands how knowledge adds value, how it is created, and why it needs to be managed. The role of Faculty development cell can be summarized as follows:

(a) Training and developing knowledge workers (Faculty);

(b) Developing Asst. Professor, Senior Lecturers and Lecturers as knowledge coordinators;

(c) Building a knowledge-sharing culture.

(d) Developing Professors to be as a part of Km Team

 KM ARCHITECTURE IN EDUCATIONAL INDUSTRY [TECHNOLOGY]

 Knowledge has become the key driving force in the present day world. It is generally believed that the only source of competitive advantage in future will be the knowledge. Therefore, in this newly emerging environment, educational industry are required to develop successful KM Architecture, to achieve sustainable competitive advantage; this is possible only through KM Portal. KM architecture is the process which explains the technology and flow of knowledge among the knowledge workers. Knowledge workers include Faculty and students.

 The following prototype will predict the knowledge flow and effectiveness of knowledge sharing in educational industry.

 The prototype consists of three blocks through which knowledge flows:

-          Faculty/ Student (Creation & Capture)

-          Knowledge Management Team (Organise & Verify)

-          Faculty/ Student/ Management (Access & Use)

 First Block:

Faculty Shares the class/ subject resources, Cases, White Papers, Research work, Latest information about the subject and in general. The contents are stored in Documents, Presentations and etc and are stored category/ Function wise.

 Second Block:

KM Team is formed and comprises of Subject matter experts based on there specialization. The experts can be Professors, Asst Professors level to review the stored documents and presentations. After verification key points are given to the faculty along with the feedback.

The verified knowledge is stored back to knowledge base for publication, paper presentations, etc and sent to third block

 Third Block:

After the review process the Knowledge is available to other faculty, Students and management were the knowledge is shared and gained by others.

INDUSTRY

KM ORGANISATION [PEOPLE]

KM Organisation is the process of Creating KM Team and defining Roles & Responsibilities of the team members in Verifying the Knowledge Captured and Approval of the same.

With increasing emphasis on knowledge-based culture, management is seeking ways to get that knowledge under management remit. The goal is to manage this aspect of the enterprise in the same way as its physical and financial assets. Charged with this are the new roles of “knowledge managers” with responsibility for creating the environment and process for dealing with knowledge as a corporate asset

Central to current concerns is the issue of KM Team. Teams, ascribed as the powerhouse of the effective institution, are more intractable from a knowledge management point of view than individuals. By their very nature teams create a great deal of new knowledge, which as such is of high value to the institution. However, the knowledge of how and why they created what they created is more difficult to get at than an individual’s knowledge, since it exists in a number of different people, and also in their continuous interaction and collaboration.

Km Team comprises of SME’s (Knowledge Managers) which includes Professors, Asst. Professor and Research Associates. The Role is to verify the captured knowledge and send Feedback to the Knowledge Worker. “Key Points” (KP) are allotted to each knowledge worker based on there knowledge they have shared.

PROS OF KM IN TODAYS ECONOMY RECESSION

Economic recession has created a challenge among the students to be competent enough to gain advantage of the limited job opportunities. Thus, KM will help the students to sharpen there skill and be updated with the latest technology and insight of multidimensional concepts.

-          Competent

-          Knowledge about Latest technology

-          Research skill

-          Insight

-          Collaborative Culture

-          Team Work

-          Conceptual Knowledge

CONCLUSION

KM itself has come a long way and has a long way to go from where it is now. It is indeed a long journey and the trip has just begun. Educational Industry has to sustain the knowledge of the faculty and students to gain an edge in the industry. This is possible only through ‘Effective implementation of Knowledge Management Portal’. A Key success factor in KM is getting optimal emphasis on each of the four focal area People, Process, technology and Content right from the early stages of deployment.

“Knowledge management is necessary for Education Industry because what worked yesterday may or may not work tomorrow”

 

 

Watch the video related to Knowledge

Evidence George W. Bush’s advanced knowledge of the attacks of September 11, 2001 *Clip from “911 in Plane Sight”

Help answer the question about Knowledge

- state 2 ways this knowledge has improved medicine and health care for humans.
- identify one specific concern that could result from the aplication of this knowledge.

About Author

I am vanitha, working as a faculty in leading management school in chennai, india. My area of interest is human resources, system, KM.