E-podium Technology: A Medium of Managing Knowledge at Al Buraimi University College via M-learning

Al Buraimi University College (BUC) is one of the well-known private colleges in The Sultanate of Oman, in Al Dhahra region, which is affiliated with California State University Northridge (CSUN), USA. It is well-known that Knowledge management can help in identifying the gaps and weaknesses in organizations and suggesting effective solutions. This paper focuses on the learning process itself. A lack in knowledge management has been identified where BUC follows a traditional way of delivering the teaching-material to students where there is no means of educational management system that is capable of handling or storing the entire lecture’s material. BUC’s students, specifically who do not regularly attend lectures due to their work obligations, are having problems with getting access to the course material. This study sheds the light on how Epodium technology along with the recent Mobile technology can solve this kind of problems. The proposed solution is novel which combines four different technological resources: M-learning, Epodium, BUC Website and Video Conferencing. E-podium device allows recording of lectures on real time. Mobile learning allows the lecturers to upload/update the course-material to their personal web page at their convenience. Students at the same time will get an access to lectures’ material as well as to the course-material. Our study showed the proposed Knowledge Management model in BUC helps in getting the most out of knowledge resources that facilitate the generation and access to the teaching material. Keywords—M-learning, E-podium, Knowledge Management, Course-material, Video-Conferencing.