Commentary on comments from Simon Caulkin, London Observer, from St. Petersburg Times Mon. Oct. 19th, 1998

The concept of knowledge management is to exploit and maximize an organization's knowledge assets, the knowledge and information skills that employees hold.

"The need and urgency for knowledge management are becoming obvious by the following:"

1) "loss of corporate memory resulting from downsizing." SPJC may feel the same loss through retirements in the next decade.

2) "intensifying competition and speed of change"

3) "dramatic expansion of the internet; business volume doubles every 100 days."

"Revan's Law

An organization's learning rate must at least equal the rate of change in the external environment, otherwise it will die."

"An organization needs to map the knowledge it contains, creating a "yellow pages" of individual skills and expertise, and must distribute this information throughout the organization."

This idea of knowledge management is intended to apply within an organization, to increase the performance of all employees. As a knowledge provider, our institution may need to apply the concept to teaching and student learning in addition to internal staff development. Another way to think about it is to view students as employees. Their job as employees is learning, and the College wants their learning to be efficient and effective.

I thought about comparing the college to a grocery store: we're most comparable to a big-lot grocery. Let me use eggs to represent knowledge. Our customers may not want to buy eggs by the gross, but that is the way we sell most of them right now, and we usually only have eggs on the first day of the month. This corresponds to bunching our knowledge product exclusively into 3 credit courses, and only starting students at the beginning of the semesters. But our students may want a dozen or fewer eggs today. How can we change so that students can find out about all the knowledge SPJC has to share, and purchase one egg at a time when they need to?

Any 3 credit course includes a number of skills and/or blocks of knowledge, but these are largely invisible to most of the College employees as well as to prospective students. I suspect that there are thousands of potential students who would like to gain some discrete skills or knowledge but who are not interested in taking a whole semester-long course. One of the problems with providing these learning modules is indexing them so counselors and prospective students can find the specific ones they want.

Registration, payment of fees, and recording of credit would need to be streamlined and adjusted to accommodate the modular concept. It would not be good to have these processes take longer than the time required to complete a module. Modules would lend themselves to distance learning.

In summary, I think learning-modules are the future of education. They fit our society's short attention span and demand for near instant gratification and customization. By authoring multimedia modules and serving them on the web we can automate the repetitive part of teaching. Faculty can then spend their time working one-on-one with students when they have questions or difficulty, and revising and authoring new modules. This allows us to serve more students better, increasing the efficiency of education.

The diagram above is not to scale, but it illustrates how we restrict the number of potential students if we only offer courses by semesters to full-time daytime students. Buy providing modular learning on demand with a significant asynchronous multimedia component we can serve a lot more people. We can put the College's knowledge resources to work serving our community.

Guy Hancock, EDGE co-chair

Back to EDGE home page"