Collaborations across Knowledge boundary: an E-Learning Case

Collaboration within interdisciplinary team is a challenge even with the presence of frequently communications. Barriers of effective knowledge delivery among team members exist because of knowledge boundary. Despite the use of common terminologies for communication, team members may create different interpretations toward a same cluster of terminologies when they hold different understandings, assumptions and values schemes embedded in their individual disciplines. In addition, interest conflicts among team members may also prohibit the effective collaboration. Such kind of barriers caused by knowledge itself usually result in an ineffective knowledge delivery in interdisciplinary collaboration. This research-in-progress study attempts to understand knowledge boundary problems and knowledge boundary spanning strategies to facilitate an effective collaboration between e-learning content developers and subject matter experts. Anchored on a case study of e-learning development project, this study explores two research questions: (1) what are knowledge boundary problems which can be found in the E-learning development process? (2) How to solve the knowledge boundary problems? Based on Carlile (2004)’s framework, we explore the difficulties that are risen by syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge boundaries when the developers interact with SMEs. The expected findings would describe the scenarios of knowledge boundary problems during the development of E-learning projects, and illustrate solutions to cope with these problems. This study would contribute to academy and practice by revealing knowledge boundary spanning in e-learning development context.