KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITY

Moving Beyond Conventional Learning Management Systems

Hsiang Hui Lek and Danny Chiang Choon Poo

School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 13 Computing Drive, Singapore, Singapore

Keywords: Knowledge Community, K-Comm, knowledge, Collective intelligence, Knowledge capturing.

Abstract: In this paper, we present a platform called Knowledge Community (K-Comm) which provides a higher

level of engagement for student learning on the web. This platform is a knowledge-based social network

which allows users to contribute and seek information. Users can ask questions or answer questions asked

by other members. K-Comm also captures user profile, and based on a user’s participation, identifies his/her

area of interest and expertise. The platform is built around the philosophy that each individual is an expert in

their own area and has the potential to share and contribute. K-Comm is driven by community effort and

being a social network, students are more willing to participate; but unlike other social networks, K-Comm

does not distract, instead, it encourages knowledge sharing and contribution.

1 INTRODUCTION

Over the last decade, there has been a major shift in

the education scene. With growing popularity of the

World Wide Web (WWW) and the increasing

connectivity, the WWW has become a channel

enabling learning in the form of e-learning

(‘electronic learning’). Educational institutions

realized the potential of e-learning and hosted their

own LMS (learning management systems). A LMS

is a software platform that allows administration of

various classroom activities. Typically they allow

various roles like the administrator or teaching staff,

and student. Teaching staff of an educational

institution teaching different courses can log into the

system to create contents for the course like lesson

plans, tutorial questions, reading materials, etc. to be

viewed by students. Students, on the other hand, are

required to log into the system to download the

materials. Common LMS include Blackboard

(Blackboard, 2010) and Moodle (Romero et al.,

2010).

LMS has indeed enabled e-learning through

the web. However, it has typically been used to

distribute learning materials to students and to keep

track of students’ academic progress. There are

usually little interaction between the students and

educators or even with their fellow classmates.

There is thus a lack in “active e-learning”. LMS

therefore lacks the element to engage students and

an environment for online interactions. Moving

beyond, we see that Web 2.0 which focuses on

information sharing and collaboration can increase

students’ level of engagement beyond the LMS.

Social networking sites, blogs, and wikis are some

examples of Web 2.0 sites. They offer students the

power to create, share content and interact with

others.

In this paper, we introduce a platform which

embraces the advantages Web 2.0 brings. The

platform, known as Knowledge Community (K-

Comm), is a knowledge-based social network site

which allows users to contribute and seek

knowledge in a web-based environment with the

purpose of sharing knowledge. Being in a

community, users will be more willing to share,

contribute and participate because their participation

will eventually benefit them.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In

the next section, we describe K-Comm. In section 3,

we look at the components of K-Comm. In section 4,

we describe how we use K-Comm in our university

setting and discuss some of the insights we gathered

through our study. We then conclude the paper.

173

Lek H. and Poo D..

KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITY - Moving Beyond Conventional Learning Management Systems.

DOI: 10.5220/0003295801730178

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2011), pages 173-178

ISBN: 978-989-8425-49-2

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

2 KNOWLEDGE COMMUNITY

Knowledge Community (K-Comm) is a knowledge-

based social network that allows users to contribute

and seek knowledge in a social networking

environment with the purpose of sharing knowledge.

As the name suggests, it is a community where

members can form groups, link and interact with

like-minded people.

Unlike most conventional social networking

sites, the main focus of K-Comm is knowledge

sharing which is mainly achieved through a question

and answer (Q&A) approach where users can ask

questions or answer questions posed by other users.

In the spirit of knowledge sharing, we recognize

that every individual has something to share and

contribute, whether it is factual knowledge or

experiential knowledge, and K-Comm provide a

means to realize and capture tacit knowledge. By

having such a platform, we can capture an

individual’s tacit knowledge and tap onto the full

potential of individuals.

Based on our experience with the previous

prototype of K-Comm (Agarwal and Poo, 2008)

which has no social networking aspect, and previous

study on barriers to knowledge sharing (Agarwal et

al., 2007), we have identified social networking as

an essential knowledge-contributing barrier breaker.

Sclater (2008) also indicated that social networking

sites, blogs, and wikis offer student unprecedented

opportunities to enable knowledge sharing and

enable interactions. As such, the underlying K-

Comm system is a social networking system that is

knowledge centric in nature that allows us to unleash

the full potential of individuals. Furthermore, in

previous study (Lek et al., 2009), we have also

demonstrated that since K-Comm is driven by

community effort, it can formalize collective

intelligence.

3 K-Comm ARCHITECTURE

3.1 Design and Implementation

We have used Elgg (Elgg, 2010), a PHP open source

social networking framework to build K-Comm.

This framework is used instead of the usual Content

Management Systems (CMS) because we wanted an

extensible framework that has social networking as

the central theme. Elgg provides us with

extensibility. Each component, for example, website

theme or features, are plug-ins and are programmed

using PHP.

3.2 Components of K-Comm

3.2.1 Profile Gathering and Personalization

K-Comm captures user profiles and allows users to

personalize their pages based on their interest.

Specifically, the system can capture user profiles

explicitly and implicitly.

User profile is captured explicitly during the

registration process. The instantiation of K-Comm in

National University of Singapore (NUS) consists of

a three-step registration process. In the first step, we

ask basic information like their name, email address

and password. In the next step, users can fill in their

general interests, specify whether they are students,

staff or alumni, and indicate the faculty they are

member of. Finally in the third step which is an

optional step, users can select the list of NUS

modules they have taken or are taking with the

option to be automatically added to the groups

created for those modules. This is to create groups

with current students and seniors who have taken

that module so that they can help one another.

The system allows administrator to customize the

list of fields to display on the registration page, and

indicate whether each field is mandatory or optional

so different instantiation of K-Comm can be

customized to the varying needs. The administrator

can also select the list of possible fields a user can

specify on their profile page.

User profile can also be captured implicitly

through users’ activities. For example, by asking a

question in the area of Computers/IT, the system

will be able to deduce that the user might be

interested in the category of Computers/IT. By

capturing user profile, the system will be able to

personalize each user’s screen. For example, looking

at the list of interest of the user, we are able to

generate a list of relevant questions to show on the

Q&A page.

3.2.2 Groups

Groups can also be created in K-Comm. They

allow members to participate in discussion forums,

post messages or share files. This helps connect

members who are interested in a particular topic.

Group owner can prevent accessibility of group

discussion forums and files to non-group member.

Thus, it allows members to create private groups

for project discussion among their project mates.

As mentioned in the previous section, we have

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Figure 1: Question and Answer.

created a group for each NUS module and the

system will, by default, add users into the

corresponding groups of the modules they have

taken. Groups are useful for students to discuss

matters concerning a module and to help one another

since the lecturers may not be available all the time.

Groups may also provide feedbacks for lecturers to

fine-tune their teaching.

3.2.3 Question and Answer (Q&A)

The key feature of K-Comm is the question and

answer (Q&A) component. This component allows

users to ask and answer questions.

Each question is organized under a category. As

K-Comm adopts a hierarchical category structure,

there could be many sub-categories for each

category. Depending on the nature of the question,

question asker will select the category which best

fits the question. However, there could be cases

where the pre-defined categories do not fit the

question. In such cases, users can suggest a category

and associate the question to the newly suggested

category. The administrator will review the question

and the category suggestion and allocate the

question to the right category accordingly or create

the new category. Other than category, tags can also

be associated with a question. Tagging provides

additional and important keywords for a question. A

tag cloud is formed on the top left section of the web

page (see Figure 1) using the list of tags. It allows

users to view questions associated to a tag. Tagging

also helps in searching for relevant questions. To

encourage users to tag and to ease user from the

trouble of tagging, the system automatically suggests

possible tags. This is achieved by analyzing the

questions using natural language processing

techniques.

Each question and answer can be rated by other

members. Users can also mark a question as a bad

question if it contains inappropriate content, or mark

it as interesting. The question asker is also allowed

to choose the best answer to the question. This

ability to rate/mark questions/answer helps in a few

ways. Firstly, it helps to verify the creditability and

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175

correctness of questions and answers. Secondly, it

demonstrates that content moderation is part of the

community effort and not one audited by the

administrators/moderators. Thirdly, the rating can

help measure the value of a question/answer. This

can be used to assess student’s level of participation.

We are also researching into automatic question

answering techniques where we hope to

automatically answer questions posted by users by

sourcing for answers from the World Wide Web.

Specifically, we aim to mine a database for specific

domains so that it can be used to answer questions

relating to that domain.

3.2.4 Other Components

K-Comm also provides other components which

might be useful for students. They include blogging,

instant messaging, and webpage creation facilities.

Furthermore, K-Comm also allows users to add

widgets to their personalized dashboard which can

integrate with existing technologies like twitter,

windows live messenger, etc.

3.2.5 Point System and Student Assessment

There is also a point system in K-Comm where

points are given to users for their participation like

inviting friends, posting questions/answers and

contributing answers. The ratings of

questions/answers also help calculate the “skill

level” of members for a particular area. This skill

level forms a rough gauge of the expertise of a

member in that particular area. Briefly, the system

calculates the skill level using a function consisting

of the following variables:

1. The rating of questions/answers in a

particular category

2. The total number of questions/answers

from the user in a particular category

3. The number of answers from the user in a

particular category which have been

selected as the best answer

A point system helps to encourage participation

and also allows lecturers to assess students’

performance based on the quality of their discussion

rather than the quantity of postings. Apart from point

system, the instructors/mentors can also monitor

students’ activity rate.

3.2.6 Privacy Issues

Like any other online communities, privacy issue is

a major concern. Users want to be able to restrict

access to their private information. This issue has

been considered in K-Comm. Users can assign

different access rights for each piece of data. For

example, they can assign different access rights to

each field in their user profile. Access rights can be

private, public, for friends, for logged in users or for

specific groups. Apart from privacy settings for user

profiles, they can also set similar access rights for

other content like their uploaded files, blog entries

and webpages.

4 DISCUSSIONS

4.1 How K-Comm was Applied

An instance of K-Comm was created for the NUS

community. A pilot experiment was carried out on

two faculties of students in NUS, namely School of

Computing and School of Business. Other than mass

advertisements, we also asked students from two

computing modules: Enterprise Systems

Development (CS2261) and Fundamentals of

Information Systems (CS2250) to use this portal to

discuss course materials, and manage their projects

through the Group feature.

For the case of CS2261, students are taught

principles of enterprise systems development and are

required to design and build enterprise systems as

part of their assignments. During the course,

students made use of the Q&A feature of K-Comm

to ask questions concerning problems they encounter

and clear doubts in the understanding of the

concepts discussed in the module. When there is a

question, fellow classmates would help answer the

questions. Unlike a forum, the Q&A feature allows

rating and the system keeps track of the number of

views for each question. Questions that were highly

rated and popular were arranged at more prominent

places relatively to other questions. Member’s skill

level for a particular category is increased each time

he/she participates in answering questions. The

higher rating given to members for their effort

further boosted the morale of the members and

encourages their subsequent participation. K-Comm,

being a social network, allows students to add other

fellow students or teaching staff as friends. This

adds a personal touch to an online portal.

The students and teaching staff in CS2250 used

K-Comm in a slightly different manner. Students are

pre-registered with the system and the accounts are

sent to all the students. They are divided in teams of

five to work on assignments together. The students

are required to create videos to describe the concepts

they have learnt in the module. Private groups are

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Table 1: Comparison.

LMS QA sites SocialNWsites K-Comm

Communication

Architecture

Communication is

usually single-

directional where

lecturers post the

learning material.

Question and Answer

approach where

someone asks a

question and people try

to answer.

Users can post

messages to their

friend’s page or talk

using the instant

messaging service

provided in the site.

Users can ask

questions and

answer questions,

or they can use the

instant messaging

service on K-

Comm to talk to

their friends.

Communication is

less interactive.

Communication can be

interactive but lacks

personal touch.

Communication is

usually more

interactive.

Communication is

interactive and

members of the

community are

usually fellow

classmates and

lecturers, so there

is more personal

touch.

Organization Modules/Courses Categories Communities

Tags, Categories,

Communities

Focus

Administration of

modules/courses

Question and

answering

Human relationship

Knowledge

Sharing and

contribution

generated for each team, and students used K-Comm

to share their videos files. Students used the file

sharing feature as a version control service for their

video files. The lecturers who form part of the

groups also used the file sharing facility to monitor

the students’ progress and to assess the quality of the

students’ works.

4.2 Feedbacks and Lessons Learnt

During our pilot experiments, we have gotten some

feedbacks as to how K-Comm could better serve the

needs of students and lecturers.

Lecturers in particular noted that they are unsure

how to do certain thing on K-Comm, so we came up

with a FAQ section with step-by-step instructions

and YouTube screen casts of the different processes.

Students generally like the idea of K-Comm but

one of the issues was that there are relatively little

posting when there are no assignment deadlines.

However, we note that there is always reply to each

posting. As such, instructors can ask probing and

pertinent questions to excite discussion and to

encourage participation.

Apart from participation, some students also

noted that there should be a good notification

mechanism in place for question answerers to

monitor comments.

4.3 Comparisons

K-Comm utilizes the wisdom of the crowds and

creates an environment where any individuals can be

an expert based on his/her experience, interest or

passion. Table 1 provides a comparison of K-Comm

with other technologies. In particular we can see that

unlike LMS where the communication is usually

uni-directional and less interactive, K-Comm allows

more interaction like that of social networking sites.

It has a much different focus compared to LMS

where the focus is to create an online portal for

managing modules/courses. Instead, K-Comm aims

to promote knowledge sharing and contribution and

achieve collective intelligence.

Unlike other online community-based systems

like iCamp (Kieslinger et al., 2006) and

TenCompetence (Koper & Specht, 2008), it is also

important to note that our system relied heavily on

natural language processing which can help in

automating certain tasks, for example, automatic

tagging of content based on the linguistic properties

of the content. It also has the potential of massively

retrieve and process information available on the

WWW to supplement existing knowledge.

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5 CONCLUSIONS

LMS has served as a means to enable e-learning and

administration of classroom events. However, it fails

to harness the full potential of what an online portal

could possibly provide.

In this paper, we described K-Comm, a platform

that can allow for more interactivity among its users.

It is able to identify the expertise of individuals and

maximizes their knowledge potential, allowing them

to contribute based on their experience, passion and

interest. Being a social network in nature, the line

between educator and students are less obvious and

students are more willing to participate, thus

achieving active learning. Currently, we have

instantiated K-Comm for our institution. Other

colleges have expressed interests to use K-Comm in

promoting active interaction in their learning

environment.

Future works will look into ways and means for

better organization and retrieval of contents. We are

also considering allowing different communities to

communicate with one another which is similar to

Simple Query Interface (Simon et al., 2005). This

will involve having an interface layer that allows

one K-Comm system to talk to another K-Comm

system or to another system like Facebook or

Yahoo! Answers. We are also trying to incorporate

automatic question answering features into the

system which would attempt to automatically

answer a question by retrieving answers from the

web.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is supported by the Singapore Ministry of

Education Academic Research Fund (AcRF) Tier 1

Grant R-253-000-049-112.

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