A Survey on Knowledge Management in the European Universities Through e‐Learning

Abstract

Many public organizations are employing Information Technology (IT) in Knowledge Management (KM). Inside universities, the use of IT would be an enabler to create and facilitate the development of knowledge; to improve knowledge sharing; to develop Communities of Practice (CoP). In particular, in the IT educational organizations it is a tool to improve the quality of learning. The Elearning is based on digital technologies and spreads through the web, through a variety of teaching methods, as a tool for KM. The websites of some universities allow anyone to follow free lessons, through the Internet. These types of free online courses that are offered by the universities are known as Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The purpose of the study is to verify how learning through the Internet (E‐learning) adopted by the European universities can facilitate the processes of transmission and sharing of knowledge. The research aims to identify the number of European universities that adopt KM based on Elearning practices. This analysis allows detecting data on universities for the region through the study of the websites of the top 100 European universities in a ranking published by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS World University ranking 2015/16). The survey represents the first step of a larger project that aims to analyse how European universities, selected from the QS rankings, prepare the organizational activities to implement the online teaching. From the results of this first phase, it has emerged that the European universities surveyed providing training not only through classroom lectures, but also with a variety of courses that are required by the web (E‐learning) also in a free (MOOCs).