Enhancing Knowledge Management Process in Academic Tutoring: The use of Domain Memory and Scenarios

Institutions of higher learning appropriately use tutoring services to enhance students’ learning. Typically, professors recommend students who exhibit excellent academic skills in a particular course or program to student learning centers to work as tutors. Tutors gain problem solving knowledge in their specific domain. This knowledge which is ingrained in the minds of individual tutors but difficult to explicate to tutees or other tutors is referred to as tacit. Institutions of higher learning can leverage the expertise of their tutors by capturing such tacit knowledge into a repository for knowledge sharing. Although several tutoring systems have been proposed to enhance the tutoring process, existing systems do not capture tacit knowledge that can be used by others. In this paper, we present an approach for sharing knowledge that utilizes features of domain memory information systems with Scenario Accumulator to support academic tutoring. This approach uses Scenarios for capturing tacit knowledge and ontology for standardizing data from diverse knowledge sources, as well as presenting common understanding of concepts among the tutors and tutees. Using the Nonaka and Takeuchi’s knowledge spiral model, we demonstrate how the architecture supports the knowledge management process from the acquisition of tacit knowledge through the sharing of explicit knowledge among tutors and tutees.