Summary: Knowledge Building Activities in an Online Community of Practice (CoP)
Title: "Knowledge Building Activities in an Online Community of Practice (CoP) at Subaru of America: A Case Study”
Name: Emilio Gomez
Date: 12/12/09

Reference: Land, S., Draper, D., Ma, Z., Hsieh, H., Jordan, R. & Smith, B. (2008). Knowledge Building Activities in an Online Community of Practice (CoP) at Subaru of America: A Case Study. The Association for Educational Communications and Technology. December 2009, from http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/ericdocs2sql/content_storage_01/0000019b/80/43/77/88.pdf

Problem: Although organizations are adept at constructing explicit forms of knowledge such as standards and procedures, manuals and other training, they are less effective at managing and facilitating sharing of more informal, tacit knowledge. According to Gray, (2004), tacit knowledge is the result of knowing and utilizing explicit knowledge through practice.

According to Land, S. et. al, knowledge building has been studied in school-based environments, yet little work has been done to extend this same knowledge-building framework to corporate contexts. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which participants’ interactions in an online community of practice (CoP) shows evidence of individual and collective knowledge building in a corporate setting.

Context: A knowledge-building CoP was designed for 38 employees from Subaru dealerships across the country. Over 8 weeks, participants accessed required weekly readings, activities and posted to the assigned discussion forum enabling them to share individual experiences and best practices with the community.

The 38 participants were exposed to content converted from a classroom-based course to industry-specific case studies, best practice development and online discussion. The course was designed around three primary knowledge-building principles by (Scardamalia, 2002): (a) idea improvement; (b) real ideas/authentic problems; and (c) community knowledge. According to the authors, the goal of this CoP was to foster an individual to share experiences with the community. The stories shared would become the community’s collective knowledge.

Findings: The results of the study are summarized according to each of the knowledge-building principles.

Idea Improvement: Participants showed evidence of engaging in dialog that contained elements of idea improvement. Contrary to Zhang et. al (2007), participants did not raise questions frequently to generate deeper understanding of explicit knowledge. Rather, they tended to build on their everyday experiences and look for solutions to future problems.

Real Ideas/Authentic Problems: The use of real ideas/authentic problems occurred more frequently in the early weeks, but the highest frequency of such responses was found in the “best practices forum”.

Community Knowledge: Building/adopting responses were frequently associated with concrete on-the-job problems that were of broad interest across the community. Per the researchers, anecdotal evidence showed that participants used some of the ideas advanced by the community to solve existing workplace problems.

Recommendations: Having worked in the management consulting industry, specializing in performance improvement and best practices implementation, I have to concur with the authors that tacit knowledge development within a corporate environment is not as effective as explicit knowledge building.

Organizations invest heavily on establishing explicit knowledge bases, which may contribute to the low effectiveness of CoPs. In addition, the mere concept of the corporate setting may intimidate employees from volunteering their ideas and experiences even when prompted to do so through instructionally designed programs.

Despite the findings at Subaru, my experiences in EDTEC 541 with our listserve (CoP) requirement indicate that education-based CoPs are not as effective either. Firstly, as a class requirement, the quality of contributions is compromised due to “the need to submit”. In addition, despite the explicit knowledge available regarding the course content (Presence Tutorials) and class lectures, contributions to our listserve included too many submissions from participants who clearly did not seek the use of explicit material as suggested by the instructor.