The organisational knowledge management for e-learning in universities
Authors: Toshio Okamoto
Venue: Proceedings of the 10th IASTED International Conference on Computers and Advanced Technology in Education (2007)

In the educational world, the Internet has created a new learning environment called "e-Learning". This e-Learning environment is expected to create a more flexible way of learning than the traditional classroom environment. The internet environment, for example, is a huge depository of distributed information and knowledge. Therefore, it is natural that people try to use this monster resource to serve their various educational needs. However, this technological resource asks people to create a new framework for their learning environments at the same time. In the future, learners may see new ways and forms of learning, curriculum development, digital contents, learning tools/applications and management of educational data etc. In this environment, people would have closer communication, exchange ideas and opinions with each other and acquire meaningful knowledge from far sites to satisfy their learning/working needs. We would like to consider the meaning of e-Learning under the following two issues. The first one is the general concept of a distance educational system which uses information and communication technologies such as networking, digital media and so on. So far, we have developed many educational /learning support systems such as CAI, ITS, ILE WBL, CSCL for improving learners' competency. These systems can deliver many contents and functions to different sites synchronously and asynchronously. The second one is the general concept of technological methodology to activate/enhance learning activity regarding human highly cognitive behaviour. In this case, we need to provide the environment to support human learning behaviour by supporting human internal competency such as visualization, knowledge discovery, and knowledge acquisition From 2004 to 2007, our university ran a three-year project called the 'GP Project' as part of a national project named "Selected Efforts of the Distinctive University Education Support Program (Good Practice Project)", with the support of the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. In this project, we replaced more than 30 existing courses with e-Learning. The courses had to be integrated seamlessly into the course management information system currently for usage in the educational affairs section. For this integration, we introduced a new Learning Management System, which is easy to customise. We developed a Learning Management System (LMS) by modifying a commercial LMS, WebClass, to which it is easy to add new functions. The first-phase system has been implemented and we are now preparing to integrate the course grade information into the LMS. This paper describes our current three-year university-wide project and then explains the functions of the newly developed LMS. This system supports registration, authoring and importing information from different sections of educational affairs. This allows effective pedagogical activities, including mentoring/coaching, through utilising Digital Portfolio (e-Karte). This three-year project with the LMS has facilitated the development of a method of organisational knowledge management and e-Pedagogy.