THE IMPACT OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES IN IMPROVING STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES

Abstract

The thesis is about knowledge management in education: how to create quality knowledge through the e-learning environment which is positively related to students’ perceptions of their learning outcomes; and secondly, how to develop communities of practice to ensure effective transfer of tacit knowledge to improve student learning. An effective knowledge management system must address both the creation and transfer of explicit as well as tacit knowledge. This research set forth that tacit knowledge must be converted into high quality explicit knowledge through the e-learning environment. The success in converting educator’s tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge to be internalised by the learner as tacit knowledge is very much depended on information quality as the medium for the conversion process. Thus, in this thesis, information quality is an essential concept to examine in the conversion process. This is to ensure that learners are able to derive quality tacit knowledge from this information. Information quality is always relative and depends on the individual or group of students who are evaluating it. Thus, any standardising of information quality has to match to a considerable large group of students’ cognitive structures. This research provides an empirical investigation of the relationship between information quality and student learning outcomes. Data for this study were collected by means of questionnaires through the survey manager in the Blackboard Learning System and were evaluated through a combination of multiple regression analysis. Data analysis revealed evidence that the relationship between the quality of information and student learning outcomes is systematically measurable, in that measurements of information quality can be used to predict student learning outcomes, and that this relationship is, for the most part, positive. Furthermore, this research set forth the conceptual review of developing communities of practice (CoPs) to transfer sustained tacit knowledge effectively to improve student learning.