Introduction
As distance learning professionals and educators, the nexus of what we deliver and present is “knowledge.” The ability to best manage this knowledge in an online delivery format could help in providing the most value to a course. As such, knowledge management and e-learning should be intertwined to produce an enriching course experience.
Over recent years, we are seeing a greater interest in the use of distance learning in education. For example, the U.S. Department of Labor within the past year announced a $2 billion Open Educational Resource program for community colleges to serve students online and will be required to make those materials—videos, text, assessments, curricula, diagnostic tools, et cetera—available to anyone in the world, free, under a Creative Commons license. Proposals for the first $500 million have already been received by the Labor Department (Vollmer, 2011).
At the same time that e-learning is growing, we are also seeing knowledge management becoming more important to organizations. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, those organizations that are integrating knowledge management into their business strategies are the leaders in their industry sectors (“Leaders Know,” 2009). Knowledge management deals with capturing, sharing, applying, and generating knowledge internally and externally.
The time has come for these two disciplines, knowledge management and elearning/distance learning, to combine to create a synergistic effect. Already, there is the fairly new Knowledge Management & E-Learning (www.kmel-journal.org/ojs) international journal published out of Hong Kong. Also, Michael Frank and I edited a book this year titled Knowledge Management and E-Learning (Taylor & Francis, 2011). And in September 2011, Reychav Iris and Anand Vikas published a paper titled “E-Learning Technologies: A Key to Dynamic Capabilities” (Computers in Human Behavior Journal, Vol. 27, No. 5) where they found a solid connection between e-learning, knowledge management, and organizational outcomes.
So, what model can we use to best leverage knowledge management and e-learning? Adapting from learning theory, we can create a Venn diagram with three components: knowledge-enabled, learner-centered, and community-access. The knowledge-enabled component would relate to knowledge retention and transfer issues. The learner-centered component relates to e-learning considerations. The community-accessed component combines both knowledge management and e-learning through social networking, online communities, and competitive intelligence. The intersection of the components may be called “strategic intelligence”; that is, how to improve the strategic decision making process of the organization.
Already, we are seeing organizations take advantage of the synergy between knowledge management and e-learning. For example, Sun Microsystems has a collaborative learning environment that includes wiki-driven capabilities within their learning management system. Shell’s Exploration and Production Division uses e-learning which integrates a web-based expertise directory, knowledge sharing forums, and centers of excellence. Cisco uses advanced e-learning systems that allow the sharing of tacit knowledge between internally dispersed technicians. John Crane, a global engineering firm, uses the Know-How e-learning platform to rapidly transfer specialized engineering knowledge across their global company. And, the Horizon Report (Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine, & Haywood, 2011), which tracks learning and knowledge, feels that these two areas are crossing geographical borders through online collaborative workspaces and social networking. This could be a way of bridging knowledge management and e-learning.
Of course, as in any discipline, there are naysayers. Some say that knowledge management and e-learning should be divorced as one field grew out of the information technology area and the other field out of the human resources and training domains. Some say that knowledge management is more strategic in nature, while e-learning is more tactical. However, others feel that these two fields should be engaged together. For example, both fields can contribute to knowledge generation and memory building. Both fields have the potential to improve an organization’s or an individual’s internal and external effectiveness. And both fields can help promote a sense of community and belonging.
It is time for the distance learning and knowledge management communities to better coalesce than in the past. In much the same way, the artificial intelligence community did not integrate early enough with the database management community, which had already addressed many of the same thorny issues being faced by the later artificial intelligence camp. Knowledge management and e-learning go hand-in-hand. Without researchers and practitioners embracing both fields in an integrated, synergistic way, I fear that we will suboptimize in terms of moving both fields forward.
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