Integration of e-Learning and Knowledge Management

e-Learning technology today is used primarily to handcraft training courses about carefully selected topics for delivery to employees registered for those courses. Knowledge management technology is used to rapidly capture, organize and deliver large amounts of corporate knowledge. This paper investigates the integration of e-Learning and Knowledge Management technology to improve the capture, organization and delivery of both traditional training courses and large amounts of corporate knowledge. First, a model is proposed for the phases of knowledge management. That model is then enhanced with concepts and technology from e-Learning. The model is then used to illustrate four real world scenarios that add increasing amounts of knowledge management to an e-Learning environment. Analysis of these four scenarios will help to better understand the practical relationship between knowledge management and eLearning. 1. Phases of Knowledge Management One way of understanding the impact of knowledge management on a corporation or government organization is to look at the knowledge management lifecycle and the flow of knowledge in the organization. Nonaka and Takenuchi [1] have investigated the relationship between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge and have described four phases of knowledge conversion: Socialization, Externalization, Combination and Internalization. The goal of the implementation of knowledge management in an organization is to increase the amount of tacit knowledge that an individual has available to apply to solving business problems. This suggests that there is a fifth phase, Cognition, which is the application of knowledge that has been exchanged through the other phases [2]. • Socialization: Transfer tacit knowledge from one person to another person • Externalization: Translate tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge in a repository • Combination: Combine different bodies of explicit knowledge to create new explicit knowledge • Internalization: Extract the explicit knowledge from a repository that is relevant to a particular person’s need and deliver it to that person where it is translated into tacit knowledge • Cognition: Apply tacit knowledge to a business problem Externalization Internalization Socialization Cognition Combination Tacit Knowledge Tacit Knowledge