Knowledge Management of Best Practices in a Collaborative Environment

Identifying and sharing best practices in a domain means duplicating successes, which help people, learn from each other and reuse proven practices. Successful sharing of best practices can be accomplished by establishing a collaborative environment where users, experts and communities can interact and cooperate. A detailed review of previous research in best practice knowledge management shows that existing models have focused on developing methodologies to manage best practices but most of them did not propose solutions towards the development of full-fledge systems that make use of technologies to allow effective sharing and reuse of best practices. This paper presents a life cycle model to manage expertise for communities of practice. The proposed model is implemented in the education field as a knowledge management system that promotes and values user’s contributions. We focus on the case of best teaching practice (BTP) as they develop instructor’s abilities and improve overall instruction quality in higher education. For this purpose, we developed a computer environment including a knowledge management system and a web portal to assist instructors in higher education in the creation, sharing and application of BTPs. Keywords—Best practice; knowledge management system; knowledge sharing; higher education; life cycle; portal