Co-designing a knowledge management tool for educator communities of practice

Gloria Milena Fernández Nieto, Zachari Swiecki, Yi-Shan Tsai, Lele Sha, Yinwei Wei, Jim Wen, Yuheng Li, Yueqiao Jin, Iván Silva Feraud, Yuan-Fang Li, Weiqing Wang, Guanliang Chen, Dragan Gasevic

Abstract: Knowledge management involves finding, expanding, and using knowledge in an organisation to achieve goals. Its role is crucial in higher education to improve problem-solving, research, and teaching by acquiring, sharing, and applying knowledge. Higher education institutions can promote knowledge management through Communities of Practice, but doing so remains challenging due to cultural, organisational, and technological reasons. We present findings of the first step of co-design workshops with authentic higher education teaching teams that sought to understand (a) their practices as a community and any motivators and impediments to their community development; (b) how they perceived the tools they use for knowledge management; and (c) the kinds of tools they believed could help them better conduct knowledge management and develop as Communities of Practice. Our findings suggested four essential design requirements and informed our development of a new tool to support the knowledge management needs of higher education teaching teams.