Lothar Letsche MA MIL

An account of my experience with online learning

A “Virtual Seminar” on Knowledge Management

Topic of the course		Knowledge Management
Subject area			Educational Psychology
URL				http://www.wissman.emp.paed.uni-muenchen.de/
				http://www.politik-digital.de/netzpolitik/elearning/mandl.shtml.
Pedagogical approach		I feel unable to provide a brief definition
Instructional setting 		German University, advanced level “Hauptseminar”
Participants			university students and postgraduates, aged approx. 22 to 60
Study mode			self-study, online and using printouts of texts and illustrations
Teaching methods used		provision of case studies, literature hints, links, assignments
Materials used			extracts from relevant articles and books (.html or .jpg files)
Assessment			comments by tutor on merits and shortcomings of assignments
Course duration			winter semester 2002/03
Technical context 		learning platform “home-made” by a student, mainly used for 
				the exchange of documents and messages

Munich University’s Chair for Empirical Education and Educational Psychology – Professor Heinz Mandl - started in 1999 to offer a “Virtual Seminar” on Knowledge Management. My “certificate of participation” describes it as follows:

Aims of the seminar, as far as content is concerned:
•	Getting to know relevant theories on Knowledge Management
•	Getting to know instruments of Mnowledge Management
•	Getting to know various practical forms of Knowledge Management application.

Aims of the seminar, as far as participants’ competence is concerned:
•	Building competence to analyze practical problems
•	Building competence to cooperate in virtual learning environments
•	Building participants’ personal responsibility for their own learning.

Seminar concept:
This is an exclusively virtual seminar, which is offered by the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) at Munich and open for students from different universities and faculties. Students work in small teams whose members come from different places, and will have to solve five assignments based on authentic practical cases, on which methods of Knowledge Management have to be applied. Fulfilling this task will require some competence to acquire an insight into theoretical concepts under their own personal responsibility, and to cooperate and communicate using the Internet. Participants will need to be able to handle conflicts in their small team, to keep up their motivation and accept a coordinator and moderator role within the group.

This certificate has been issued to participants who have demonstrated these competences for six months and acquired a knowledge both of theory and methodology.

Although I am 56 and work at a research institution, I was one of the more mature postgraduates who were accepted for the fourth run in the winter semester 2002/03. The language of instruction was German. No fees were charged.

The seminar was opened with an optional introductory briefing at the LMU on 15 October and ended with an on-campus colloquy on 4 February, at which attendance was compulsory (and the University paid the fares of external participants). This replaced the “concluding documentation” which was previously required of participants for their credit. The rest of the work and communication throughout the seminar was done online from the participants’ workplace or home. No other personal attendance was required. 

The organizers had calculated five to six hours a week which participants should be prepared to spend on the seminar. I found this unrealistic, at least for some of the assignments, and sometimes spent considerably more hours at work or at weekends on some of the more “tricky” questions. 

13 of the original 26 registered participants remained on my course, which – we were told – corresponded to the average dropout rate. 4 of us came from outside Munich, which was a smaller proportion of external participants than in previous courses.  We worked in three groups of 4 or 5 (inevitably with some reshuffle at the beginning), which chose their own groupnames. This cartoon by Tomi Ungerer inspired my group to give its expression its “hunger for knowledge” in its name:

The seminar was divided into six fortnightly “blocks” (interrupted by the Christmas break) with three assignments each. One of these had to be submitted by each participant individually, the others by the group, usually shared between two teams of two or three. A framework was provided by a rigid timetable with deadlines for submission of the assignments. Coordination within the group was meant to be a self-organized process – with one “coordinator” for each “block” in rotation -  and it worked well in our group with little intervention by our supervisor or tele-tutor. But most of the communication tended to remain within the small teams or groups, and – on the whole – little notice was taken of what the others were doing at the same time. Tutorial feedback provided comments on all entries that had been submitted, but sometimes it came so late that it was no longer an encouragement to browse in the other group forums (which were accessible to all). The combination of a strict timetable and individual responsibility at least for parts of the “group” assignments left little room for “passive” participation or “social loafing”. One participant in our group who was unable to spend as much time as we all had pledged to do, left the seminar on his own. When I had problems on one occasion to meet the deadline for my contribution to a joint assignment, the others in the group – and the tutor – took a sympathetic attitude, and later I submitted my share to make sure the others did not feel I was taking advantage of the “group” situation.

The Knowledge Management concept, as put forward by the LMU team of educationalists, defines itself as a holistic one, with less emphasis on business management and technical aspects than what the name of their academic discipline implies – Educational Psychology. Human individuals play an equally important role in KM concept as “the organization” and “technology”, so the emphasis of this approach is on the individuals’ knowledge, on “building” their individual competence and defining their role within the “organizational” process. Gabriele Reinmann-Rothmeier’s and Heinz Mandl’s “reference model” of KM distinguishes four categories of “processes”: knowledge representation, knowledge communication, knowledge generation and knowledge utilization. The Virtual Seminar covered these four processes one by one, after two rounds on general definitions of “Knowledge” and “Knowledge Management”. 

This was only a seminar on “theory”, based on texts with the occasional illustration and diagram, but not on technical implementations or demonstrations.

Online communication through the LMU platform worked well during most of the course, but we did encounter some technical inadequacies. At times – including the Christmas break -, some or all participants were cut off, even though a special access had been provided for those whose own institutional network was protected by a firewall. The built-in chat facility proved inaccessible or unworkable for some participants - apart from not supporting German characters, not showing the date of previous contributions, not having a facility to save these dialogues, nor a help function. So most of the communication was done through the respective group forum, electronic mail or the occasional telephone call. It was evident that – on the whole - some form of asynchronous communication was better suited to our needs as “virtual participants” than, say, an arrangement to meet in the chatroom on Monday at 7 pm. A certain proportion of the participants’ communication appears to have been exchanged through other channels (mainly e-mail), which meant that neither our LMU supervisor nor the group coordinator was able to monitor all the steps that preceded the handing in of a piece of work by two or three joint contributors. The “plenary discussion” and “general questions” forums were hardly ever used. They might have been useful in a different setting.

While learning a great deal about Knowledge Management, from which I will be able to benefit for my own job, we were also the guinea-pigs for our tele-tutor’s doctoral dissertation, and filled in various questionnaires during the course in addition to an official evaluation sheet at the very end.

One of my insights from the “case studies” was that some of the problems which Knowledge Management tries to define and tackle sound all too familiar when boiled down to what they are really about, and expressed in less specialized, more “common sense” terminology. This sort of analysis is useful when one tries to pinpoint what is really new and specific about “managing knowledge” within companies and organisations.