Knowledge management system using student-as-customer approach

Abstract

Nowadays, the importance of knowledge acquisition and management for business and other purposes can hardly be overstated. Corporations are increasingly invested in the formalization and standardization of Customer Knowledge Management (CKM) with the aid of Knowledge Management (KM) tools and techniques, in order to facilitate the exchange of information with customers, and thus secure a competitive edge. Nevertheless, and curiously so, higher education administrators have only recently come to a substantive appreciation of this importance. Higher education institutions lag hugely behind the business world in the implementation of KM, and a highly interactive and dynamic learning environment remains in the horizons. An emerging and fairly widespread trend among learning institutions nowadays is to view and treat students as customers, and thus seek to satisfy them along these lines. In this light, therefore, the former strive to understand students’ perception of such a business-customer relationship in the context of knowledge delivery. They invest appreciable proportions of human and financial capital in seeking students’ opinion on all aspects of academic life, as well as their input on ways to improve the learning environment. The perception of students as customers by educational institutions should not be any cause for alarm: upon enrolment, students effectively enter into a binding economic agreement to pay for, and to receive educational services of a certain standard. Thus, it is only fair for them to have a conducive forum to express their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the services provided. The need for such a forum has been duly recognized by the UM, and the latter is well on track to developing and instituting an electronic system for just this purpose. The system in question, a web-based system wherein students (customers) can freely express their needs and wants as far as service provision is concerned, will be investigated and developed in this research. Particularly, this research has as main purpose the design and development of a (SKMS) with three stakeholders, namely: students, administrative and nominal staff. All three stakeholders, who also hold stakes in the learning institution, shall have direct access to the system. The system avails questionnaire forms, discussion communities (forums), with suggestion and feedback capabilities, to provide an all-inclusive strategy for milking the minds of students and other stakeholders. For this research, a quantitative approach, by way of survey using questionnaires and a short interview, is adopted: questionnaires afford a holistic view of the customers’ needs; a short one-on-one interview casts a shade of depth and detail to these needs. Questionnaire survey forms were handed out to 93 strategically selected students; findings from the analysis of data thus gathered were used as the primary set of system requirements for the proposed SKMS. After development, the system was thoroughly evaluated by a survey involving ten students. Feedback was mostly positive, indicating to what extent users thought the system would cater to their needs.