Knowledge management and itsinfluence on the efficiency of maritime education and training institutes (a case study)

144 Knowledge Management and itsInfluence on the Efficiency of Maritime Education and Training Institutes (A Case Study) Capt Amr Moneer Ibrahim (1)Capt Eslam Mostafa Gaber (2) Arab Academy of Science[.]

Knowledge Management and itsInfluence on the Efficiency of Maritime

Education and Training Institutes (A Case Study) Capt Amr Moneer Ibrahim (1) Capt Eslam Mostafa Gaber (2)

Arab Academy of Science, Technology & Maritime Transport (AASTMT), amr.ibrahim@aast.edu

Arab Academy of Science, Technology & Maritime Transport (AASTMT),eslam.gaber@aast.edu

Abstract Knowledge Management (KM) had been one of the hottest topics in the last decade, especially

in knowledge-intensive and highly competitive organizations Admitting that knowledge is a key asset

in any organization, any management should start planning how to manage the knowledge available in the organization represented in employees, and how to establish a method to utilize and maintain such knowledge in order to become skilled at creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge to support sustainable development of the organization

The Maritime Education and Training (MET) is a vocational education in general; requires highly qualified and field-experienced individuals to serve as maritime teachers This arises the research problem; that mostly used KM tools may be good enough to efficiently manage explicit knowledge but

do not manage implicit knowledge to the same extent, especially when dealing with implicit-rich educational facility like marine simulators Therefore, a system capable of concurrently managing both explicit and implicit knowledge is critically in need, in order to resolve the current problem

From that perspective, this paper illustrates the introduction of KM concept into Maritime Education and Training, specifically in short courses delivered by the Marine Simulator Department in the Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport An appropriate KM tool was introduced and implemented, managing both implicit and explicit knowledge simultaneously over a period of 14 months, over which continuous feedback were collected quantitatively and statistically analyzed The findings of the study were interestingly positive The efficiency of education for the test subject have improved significantly after comparing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) before and after adopting the KM system into the department The paper finally recommends that due to the special nature of MET; a specified (MET related) Knowledge Management tool should be developed and generalized to all aspects of MET

Key words: Knowledge Management, Maritime education and Training, Communities of practice,

Implicit and explicit knowledge, Short Maritime Courses

1 Introduction

Knowledge Management (KM) had been a hot topic in the last few years, it was found essential especially in knowledge intensive and highly competitive organizations Admitting that the knowledge

is the main asset in any organization, any management should start planning how to manage all the knowledge available in the organization represented in their employees, and how to establish a method

to utilize and maintain such knowledge

KM concept is important to enhance the understanding of how an organization becomes skilled at creating, acquiring and transferring knowledge to support sustainable development

Therefore, this paper will discuss KM concept and its sub-theories, of Communities of Practice (COP) and different types of knowledge, and how a successful KM system could be established Furthermore,

to illustrate the functionality of these theories, an issue in a Maritime Education and Training Institute (METI) concerning a knowledge gap problem between teachers will be taken as a case study, proposing

a KM strategy to address this problemillustrating the positive effect on the performance of Maritime teachers, demonstrating different aspects of implementations from all perspectives

The main derive behind this research is the absence of an effective knowledge management tool in METIsand how it negatively affects the efficiency of educational services presented

The research aims tohighlight the importance of Knowledge Management in METIs, manufacture and test a suitable knowledge management tool, and use this tool to manage knowledge assets within, in order to have sustainable development and efficiency in its education and training In other words, the research should answer the following:

1 What is the importance of KM to METIs?

2 How to establish an appropriate KM tool to METIs and use it efficiently?

3 Does the application of KM concept improve the METIs performance?

1.1 Research Methodology, Research Plan& Paper Structure

McIntyre, Gauvin, & Waruszynski (2003) claims that KM is a “multi-disciplinary” field derived from

theories in economics, sociology, philosophy and psychology Information technology (IT) and data storage systems also contribute to the field of KM Combining and applying multiple theories to practical problems within organizations has a pragmatic approach, concerning applicable solutions, not to add, the analyzing and measuring capabilities with high reliability

Saying so, in the first part of this paper we will try to provide a structure for a KM solution appropriate

to the special nature of METIs, in order to ensure its fruitfulness In the second part, the efficiency of this KM tool will be tested through a research involving three Maritime lecturers (1 senior and 2 juniors) Where the senior lecturer will share his knowledge using different methods of the KM tool Throughout the period of the research (14 months), feedback will be collected from trainees attending the subject course held by the three lecturers Quantitative method will be applied to statistically analyze the efficiency/progress of the KM tool used

In the end, the case study would present a suitable KM-MET tool, prove the importance of KM to METIs and that if well implemented, will affect the educational efficiency positively

1.2 Literature Review

Literature provides hundreds of definitions of KM, many of them are related to the context of information being used or processed within the system On the other hand, some definitions suit all types

of information One of the widely used definitions is offered by Davenport (1994) saying that Knowledge management “is the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge", as simple as that

A different definition touches the context of information used in a company is the one introduced by Karlsen & Gottxchalk (2004) “Knowledge management is a method to simplify and improve the process

of creating, sharing, distributing, capturing, and understanding knowledge in a company”

The Gartner Group created yet another definition, but carries a detailed description suitable to an

information intensive enterprise, expressed by Duhon (1998) "Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all

of an enterprise's information assets These assets may include databases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously un-captured expertise and experience in individual workers."

In addition, there are definitions that introduce Information Technology (IT) systems as a major player

in a successful KM system as the definition laid by Tan, Et al (2007) “Knowledge management deals

At the same time, another set of definitions focuses on human factor and introducing the concept of

Communities of Practices (COPs), like the one adopted by Swan, Newell, Scarbrough, & Hislop (1999)

“Knowledge management is about harnessing the intellectual and social capital of individuals in order

to improve organizational learning capabilities”

The latent set of definitions maybe suitable to be applied in an educational facility, although it will not cover the major aspects that characterizes the maritime education Given the nature of the industry, an MET-related KM definition may still be required to be innovated

Abundancein literature concerning KM concepts applied in corporates is clear, produced as early as the 1990s (Gupta & Govindarajan (1991), Hedlund (1994) & Wiig (1997) With the beginning of this century, the interest of applying KM concepts into education had been focused upon; it started with a trial to implement corporate-KM in education as did Kidwell et.al in 2000 & Bernbom in 2001 Then there were a huge studiousnesssurge into the matter when the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) were established in 2002, since then, there had been serious literature on applying KM in education, like what (Sallis & Jones) & (Serban & Luan) wrote in 2002, followed by Petrides & Nodine in 2003 and Metcalfe in 2006 It is fair to say that KM in education literature surged after the establishment of ISKME

Education may be the same when it comes to philosophies and theories, but the application may differ when it faces a special nature of education, like the maritime education Maritime education is a vocational education, derived largely from vocational-knowledge and experience, which is reflected greatly in the scarcity of experienced maritime teachers

Applying KM in the maritime domain were greatly addressing the shipping industry either in running shipping companies like in articles and books of Fei in 2011,2013 or shipping logistics as written by Lee & Song in 2010, 2015; Radhika in 2014.A modest approach were made to the application of KM in METIs found in a few paragraphs in an article by Raicu & Niţǎ in 2008 and a research done by Kitada wrote about the application of KM techniques to improve online MET in 2015

The absence of literature describing a serious long time testing of the application of KM concepts and techniques in METIs will be one of the motivation for the contribution of this research and future researches

2 How to Establish a MET Related KM tool

2.1 KM and Communities of Practice (COPs)

COPs has proven to be the most important factor in any KM system, the core of knowledge is the people who hold this knowledge, extracting and sharing this knowledge is done easily and smoothly in a COP Wenger (2006) defines COP as “Groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they

do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly”

According to Wenger (2006) any COP consists of three components:

The domain: A COP is not necessarily a network between people It can be a unique identity defined

by a shared domain of interest This implies and produces some sort of a commitment to the domain

The community: To form a COP, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other,

and share information Being in the same field of work and having the same daily tasks do not necessarily form a COP, a strong relationship must be built enabling them to share and learn within a circle of interest and trust

The practice: A community of practice is not a community of interest Members of a community of

practice must be practitioners They develop a shared reservoir of experiences, tools, and ways of dealing with problems

“Nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realize that their lunch

discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients Still,

in the course of all these conversations, they have developed a set of stories and cases that

have become a shared repertoire for their practice.” Wenger (2006)

The concept of COP is applicable in all sort of human-interactive entities, like organizations, institutions, governmental/non-governmental associations, and most importantly, educational institutes, which is the core subject of this paper

2.2 Implicit and Explicit Knowledge

As discussed, KM is all about sharing knowledge with others sharing the same interest, based on interactive and transmission processes between producers and consumers of knowledge This knowledge is either implicit or explicit

Schacter (1987) defines implicit memory by the limited control of conscious or intentional recollection

of data Reber (1993) on the other hand, defines implicit learning as “the acquisition of knowledge that takes place largely independently of conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired”

The difference between implicit and explicit was expressed by Dienes & Perner (1999) in an illustrative example “They didn’t say so explicitly; it was left implicit” Furthermore, a formal differentiation between implicit and explicit knowledge is introduced by Polanyi (1966):

“Explicit knowledge is that which is stated in detail and leaves nothing merely implied It

is termed “codified” or “formal” knowledge because it can be recorded Implicit

knowledge is that which is understood, implied and exists without being stated It is informal, experiential, and difficult to capture or share It is knowledge that cannot be

expressed”

Because of that contradiction, different KM methods should be used to deal with different types of knowledge says Fei (2011), IT for example has limited outcome when implicit knowledge is transferred, when face-to-face approach should be facilitated for better results

2.3 How to Transfer Knowledge

Based on Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995) theory on organizational knowledge creation, where it says that the best results of flowing of information through an organizational KM system happens when the knowledge is converted from implicit to explicit continuously and dynamically, as illustrated in figure 2.1

Educational knowledge is pretty much complicated; it is a strong mixture of implicit and explicit knowledge, to the extent that a decent education process cannot be built on one type without the other (Pazaver, 2013)

Therefore, it is important to manage the cycle of knowledge very carefully to ensure the complete beneficence of the information within Nonaka & Takeuchi theory has four pillars; socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization

Implementing Nonaka & Takeuchi cycle in METs as follows:

1 Socialization (implicit to implicit)

Experienced teachers share implicit knowledge with the new incomers based on the “share and learn” concept

“The results of a recent study conducted by the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management found that

even in a company with a well-developed infrastructure of knowledge management technology, people

still turn first to other people as they seek solutions to problems and knowledge” Bartlett (2000)

This step is mostly done through formal/in-formal COPs, technology may also be used to support knowledge sharing and learning process

2 Externalization (implicit to explicit)

McIntyre, Gauvin, & Waruszynski (2003) divided this step into two parts:

Capture and Acquire: where new teachers gain implicit information from the close socialization with

seniors in a COP, then tries to converse it into explicit knowledge by recording it into the CMS, e.g., attending a lecture with an experienced teacher and trying to record notes of tactics used during the lecture, body movement, voice tone, analogies, metaphors etc…, the main challenge here is the ability

of the new teacher to capture this implicit knowledge from his tutor

Organize: After establishing a KM system that enables organizing and editing the context, a suitable

CMS would be a useful platform for new teachers to upload their findings and recording the knowledge gained from their socialization This platform can even be used by the management as an assessment tool to assess all teachers and quantify their performance as discussed earlier

3 Combination (explicit to explicit)

This is where the new explicit knowledge added by the new teacher is joined in the CMS with other explicit knowledge recorded from other teachers, resulting in a resourceful and enriched database Now the information can be circulated, shared, evaluated, and (more importantly) accessed through a search engine using technological and statistical methods capable of retrieving the required content

4 Internalization (explicit to implicit)

This is the process where teachers practice repeatedly what they have learned as explicit knowledge, either from the database, in training sessions, or in real classroom environment supervised by a senior staff member This internalization period lasts until the new teacher accommodates a satisfying level of implicit knowledge, and only then, the management can end his training period and confirm his employment

To that point, the cycle will have had completed its first round and starts a new round for additional knowledge building up in the data base, conditioned by the participation of senior/junior staff members under managerial supervision

2.4 The Design and Structure of theMET Related KM System

Inspired by a research done by Haas, Aulbur & Thakar (2003), a MET Related KM system can (and was) established by doing the following:

1 Construct COPs from expert teachers in different subjects and specialties (representatives) to extract different expertise and different ideologies and backgrounds COP of navigation teachers, COP of stability teachers, etc…

2 Encouraging the formation of formal &non-formal COPs of teachers and try to institutionalize these groups

3 Establish a Content Management System (CMS)1suitable to deal with different types of knowledge (implicit–explicit)

4 Force/encourage teachers to participate in the formal/in-formal COPs and provide feedback

5 Management may use CMS to monitor the progress of junior teachers and evaluate accordingly

6 Teachers who will not participate in the system will be sanctioned or may even get their contract terminated, depending on their progress verses time allowed

7 May be used in calibrating the performance of senior teachers, through evaluating the data recorded

by the juniors explicating the knowledge they gained from them

3 Case study & Research Framework

After constructing the KM system, a COP of three Maritime Lecturers were constructed They all shared the same interest in simulator based training The COP consisted of one senior lecturer with long experience in teaching the subject simulator course; where the 2 junior lectures were new to the subject course teaching

The current research includes 1053 trainees attending a Short (5 days) Simulator Course, tested over a period of 16 months, from 4thof January 2015 to 24thof April 2016, subdivided into three groups:

Group No.1 (G1)

Feedback from 346 trainees were collected, representing 32.9% of the population, over a period of 6 months During this time, the KM system and the CMS were established and in progress but the receiving instructors were not contributing to teaching in the classroom, the senior instructor was still

in full command of the complete course being the sole instructor This group is considered a control group validating the hypothesis of the research

Group No.2 (G2)

Feedback from 175 trainees, representing 16.5%, collected for the period of one month At this time of research, the senior instructor allowed the receiving instructors to contribute in actual teaching under his direct supervision and intervening when appropriate; as a part of the Knowledge transfer plan

Group No 3 (G3)

532 trainees, representing 50.5%, of which feedback were collected for the period of 7 months In this period of time, the senior lecture had stepped down handing over the full responsibility of the course to the junior lecturers As a final step in the research

As the main idea of the research is to find out if the implementation of the Knowledge Management (KM) model introduced was effective or not, the research will compare the periods under study by comparing different responses to the research statements in different periods of implementation Also, the overall performance in the three groups will be constructed and compared Accordingly, the research hypothesis could be stated as follows:

H 1 : There is a positive change in the overall performance as we proceed in the steps of KM implementation.

All trainees were subject to a survey of 9 questions and the answers were collected and entered on SPSS – version 22 to be analyzed The analysis includes a descriptive analysis for the statements under study Also, data testing using validity and reliability tests will be applied to check the validity of data for the

1 CMS are systems that enable adding, editing, formatting, publishing and maintaining data These systems can also be integrated into more sophisticated programs that have the ability to extract more information statistically and knowing which individual has what information,

analysis and to be able to construct the Performance as a variable out of the questionnaire statements assigned to the mentioned variable In addition, ANOVA testing will be used to show if there is a significant difference in the data under study between different periods of implementation Finally, a focus will be done on comparing the performance of the two periods of implementation; G1 and G3, where an independent samples t-test will be used to show if there a significant difference in the data under study

The tools of ANOVA and t-tests are used to examine the difference between different groups within the same variable A t-test is used if the testing variable consists of two groups So, it can be used to determine if two sets of data are significantly different from each other If the testing variable contains more than two groups, the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) will best fit rather than the t-test (Farrell, 2006) This means that the t-test will be used to test if there is a significant difference in the research statements, as well as the overall performance according to different periods of Knowledge Management implementation; as the latter is the testing variable consisting of only two groups; No1 & No 3 On the other hand, the ANOVA test will be used to test if there is a significant difference in the research statements as well as the overall performance according to different periods of implementation, as the latter one consist of three groups

3.1 Data Analysis& Testing

In this section, data testing and analysis will be presented using the above mentioned tools to figure out

a response of the hypotheses under study

3.1.1 Descriptive Analysis

Table 3.1 Descriptive Analysis for the Statements under Study

The descriptive analysis shows a summary about the simple features of the data under study It could be observed that most of the overall opinions lie in the zone of Excellent and very good, indicating an

Research Item

Frequency

Q1:Rate the course

Q2:Rate the course

Q3: To what extent

was the course

content compatible

with course objectives

Q4:Rate the course

knowledge added

value

Q5:Rate the practical

gained skills during

the course

Q6:Rate the course

lecturers’

performance

Q7: How was the

interaction between

you and the lecturer?

Q8: How useful was

the discussions held

during the course?

Q9:Rate the

simulators’

familiarization period