The case for integrating and leveraging knowledge management and ELearning for effective online education

Abstract

The rapidly growing use of technology in education is changing the way knowledge is produced, stored, and distributed to students locally and globally. Today, learning is no longer solely deployed in a physical classroom due to the increased rate of student’s enrollment in online education for various reasons. The nation's educational system greatly benefits from internet-enabled distance learning, also known as online education, by liberating students from the usual available options of on-campus degree programs such as commuting to school, preparing their day for courses, and being physically present during each cycle of their coursework. The necessity of Knowledge Management (KM) to facilitate online learning has received higher attention within the educational arena in the last years. Knowledge management of organizations will determine the processes that the knowledge will be retained, exchanged, and enriched over years. Additionally, knowledge management has been defined as the process that enables the organization to create, store, transform and exchange knowledge within the organization. Universities face challenges in creating and exchanging knowledge, these challenges resulted from the lack of KM strategies to organize KM in all directions. As per various educational theories universities should adopt knowledge-based theory to improve competitiveness and improve performance. The theory is based on discovering knowledge, its acquisition, creation and dissemination and transmission of this knowledge through teaching. Moreover, retention rates at higher education institutions remain a focus in this present pandemic era and data from the United States (U.S.) Department of Education (2021) revealed an overall drop for full-time students in 2020, from 76.1 percent in 2019 to 75.7 percent. For part-time students, there was an even more significant drop, from 46.5 percent in 2019 to 43.5 percent in 2020. For educational institutions, it is imperative to understand the causes of lower retention, and the way higher education institutions could overcome this challenge. One method that is being pursued by higher institutions is online education, as a note online education is now accepted as the “wave” of the future, knowledge is being distributed across both space and time. Knowledge management techniques are also used to capture, organize and deliver this knowledge, and management systems can be used to quickly identify the most relevant information and distribute it to meet specific needs. The art of adding knowledge management and E-Learning together is a form of technological advancement.