THE IMPACT OF KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT PRACTICES IN IMPROVING STUDENT LEARNING OUTCOMES
by Chris Shiuan En LEE
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.