Knowledge Management in Community College- Chapter 1 Progress

1. INTRODUCTION

 

Background

Knowledge management as a dicipline has witnessed fundamental changes during the past two decades, allowing knowledge seekers around the globe to have access to information which two decades ago, was inaccessible. In addition to his transformation, many traditional organizations and business enterprises have taken advantages of the technologies offered by the development of knowledge management systems in order to expand and augment their existing programs. This has allowed practioners and reserachers to serve their customers, employees and stakeholders more effectively and efficiently and efficiently in the modern virtual world. With continued technological innovations in information and communication technology and with on going discovery and research into newer and more innovative techniques and applications, the acknowledge management discipline will continue to witness an explosion of information within this rapidly evolving field.

Education, a major institutional force in the socialisation of the individual, is at least in part about managing the transfer of information for the creation of knowledge between lecturers and students. Let us consider the lecturer-student interaction for a moment. A lecturer is a trained expert in a particular field and uses different resources (books, articles) in order to teach a, usually, national standard curriculum. The different resources form the link between what the lecturer needs to convey and what the students need to learn. This is an informational link on the one level. On another level, however, it intends to 'form' the student's knowledge of a particular module or subject. We know that education – whether at the level of the curriculum, college/school or individual lecturer – is not objective, and the information intended to form students' knowledge can be managed for a desired effect.

     "Driving knowledgeable and skilled community " is a slogan, backed by all community colleges in the community Malaysia. As a training institution under the auspices of the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education, the purpose of community colleges is clear when it comes to the true meaning of the slogan. Community College began operating the pilot at ten colleges in June 2001 and is now the number rose to 38 community colleges and 18 branches throughout country. In early 2010, community colleges have gone through waves of transformation in which the strengthening of the institution itself in the rule center of excellence in knowledge sharing among local communities.
As a community college employees, who are directly involved with the modus operandi of community colleges, researchers look at the overall mechanism for knowledge sharing conducted by community colleges. There are researchers looking for ideas on how knowledge management (KM) can provide benefits to this transformation, or consolidation to be realized. Researchers expand his view on the idea to the broader scope of the local community. How KM at community colleges will benefit the entire organization in which researchers see as a local community organization. Various questions arise from the idea and indirectly led researchers to study more deep the scope. There are a variety of scholarly materials such as books, journals or theses published a range of KM. Among of them are, how KM helps an organization, especially those involving the corporations who make profits, Role of KM for Organization also said regardless of social or corporate organizations. However, the obstacles in the implementation of KM is not so dealt with and discussed. What more obstacles in the implementation of the KM community colleges, researchers found that it was never spoken but KM itself has not been studied in depth at the community colleges in Malaysia.

 

 

Statement of the Problem

Hence the study of KM in the community colleges is limited, researchers try to learn what KMS implementation in a community college that can be realized. How can KMS achieve a knowledge-based organization?, and within the scope of this study researchers have expressed the local community as an organization should be guided towards a knowledge based organization?. Observations on previous studies and actively committed to the diligent reading of all to answer the research questions triggered by the researchers. Although KM is an advanced in western countries, such as giant corporations like HP, BP, Shell has demonstrated that KM has a positive impact on the progress of the company and can be implemented, but whether it is carried out in parallel if KM is implemented in community college especially in Malaysia still a question. In fact, culture sharing of knowledge among Malaysians is still low and it is a principal issue to be refined. The impact as example, a situation that occurred at the community college, students still make mistakes in completing a task that is similar and often repeated.    

Regarding to the tranformation launched by the ministry of higher education in the early 2010, as community college get involved too, in learner-centered, all college members, including the director, lectures, staff, students and parents, are regarded as learners, and learning opportunities are provided for each and every single one of them to enhance their learning ability and knowledge; it is expected that learners will become autonomous and lifelonglearners, critical thinkers, and knowledge-producers. To this end, community college must become Knowledge-Creating institution. Thus, community college need to become boundaryless organizations, reinvent curriculums and adopt knowledge management (KM) for teaching and learning.

 

Purpose of the Study

     There are many methods and strategies in KM implementation at the community college even if it is not something that simple. Community members may not be skilled in using IT, culture of competition of life and the difficulty for community members to find the right time to use the system introduced. On behalf of the community college which serves as the center of the community gradually to foster a culture of knowledge sharing and thus form a KM initiative itself. The unit of information technology program Kolej Komuniti Pasir Salak, such as putting video on the process of identifying damage to a computer on the internet via the existing medium and indirectly it can be shared by local communities in Pasir Salak, such as computer repair shop and they can be applied in ensuring and identified that damage to computer more quickly and eventually became a total success in terms of quality of service the shop.

What is the status of implementation of KM in the college community college?
What model can be introduced and can be used for community college towards KMS implementation?

     Guided by the KM theory and implementation of KMS, it can be deemed as an advantage to obtain precise information on how the structure, components or groups of KM's components interact. There are also a successful implementation of KM in corporate institutions can be found and adapted at the community college. In the implementation of KM is not only the technical aspect of it involves the non-technical, community colleges can not say KM has been implemented only with a portal or web site.

 

Limitations

This research will cover some selected community colleges. It shall also make some comparison analysis among these selected organizations in the implementation of knowledge management. As this study aims at implementation of knowledge management from the person, academic in-charge through the lens of self-evaluation, all interview sessions with the interviewees and other materials gathered directly from those selected organizations would be used as primary source data. This research will limit it analysis to issues that were initially raised by the researcher and issues that were generated in the course of interviewing the selected individual. As this research is interpretive and explorative in nature, the research is limited only to the above mentioned criteria. This research is also limited in it analysis to the method supported by SPSS, an analysis tool.

 

Delimitations

     The study centered on the implementation of KM in an organization that can develop towards a knowledge organization and interaction among its members. Based on the KM is implemented in the organization can be adapted to produce a KMS model for the implementation of KM in the community college.

 

Thesis Structure

The structure of the rest of the thesis is as follows:

Chapter 2: In this chapter, the researcher briefly presents the field of education and the
role of teaching and learning improvement. The researcher focuses particularly on the use of knowledge management in education, or the learning organization as it also known. We also give an overview of research methods in education, and a detailed description of the research methods used in this thesis.

Chapter 3: Here the researcher presents the research method we have used for his different studies
with arguments for why this is suited for our cases. He explores his research themes and his chosen research questions. He also describes the different contexts of the studies.

Chapter 4: The researcher presents the main results of our studies. The chapter first explores all the
individual studies. He then sums up the contributions.

Chapter 5: The researcher discusses his findings within his three major research themes. Compare
them with his contributions and the literature. Next is researcher sums up the main findings from the discussion, and outline possible
further work in the field of knowledge management in community college.

Appendix A: The researcher presents the papers that submitted or published that
contain material this thesis is based upon.

 

Definition of Terms

There are certain terms are used widely in this study. Researcher are define the terms that will be used in this study as below:

KK: community college

KM : knowledge management

ICT: Information and communication technology

SPSS: Statistical Package for Social Science software

Qualitative Analysis: A process of examining and interpreting data in order to elicit meaning, gain understanding, and develop emperical knowledge.

 

Summary

This chapter discussed about KM implementation issues in community college, problem statement of this research and how research will be conducted. The background of this work, objectives and research purpose were also provided, followed by contributions, research limitations and overview for each chapter. Next chapter will be about literature review which will give an idea about the work done so far in KM implementation.