Deploying Knowledge Management for Effective Technologies in Higher Education Partnerships

Introduction

The Higher Education sector’s current collaborative culture is aimed at building resilience and coping with the dynamics of global educational change. However, there are many underutilised technologies in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), especially when considering the stages of partnership development and the potentially significant role of technology in communication and learning across institutions. Even though, communication and learning practices are well rooted within UK HEIs there is indication that existing practices could be further developed and as a result that would enhance knowledge creation capacities. The following sections further point out that although embedded KM practices and activities support social capital development, it is expected that HEIs could exploit their available underutilised technologies better to improve their impact on social capital from partnership ventures.

HEI executives, governors and leadership teams should explicitly include KM training in staff Continuing Professional Development strategies and should promulgate an understanding of their institute’s Social Impact as these will not only benefit themselves but will also benefit HE partnership development. Scholars, HE policy makers and HE practitioners of KM can gather a range of insights, presented through the following sections, pointed at fostering communication and learning, with underutilised technologies in the Higher Education context.

Therefore the objectives of this chapter are to:

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  Identify the developmental stages of a Higher Education Partnership so that deployment of underutilised knowledge management technologies can be identified at each stage.

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  Propose Knowledge Management factors specifically useful for the evaluation stage of a Higher Education Partnership thus, if those factors where measured organisational learning could be fostered more easily.

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  Provide discussion of underutilised technologies in Higher Education Partnerships and explain how improving utilisation would enhance institutional and cross-institutional performance.

Background To The Hei Context

The crucial purpose of Knowledge Management (KM) in Higher Education is to make certain that performance is maintained at desired results through knowledge creation. The modern context of global Higher Education is such that, HEI collaborative ventures are widespread and becoming normal. Many HEIs are developing sustainability, resilience and growth through partnership development (Bamber & Elezi, 2020a; Bordogna, 2019; Guerrero et al., 2019). For high performance of partnerships it is essential that knowledge management factors are managed to effectively maintain and transfer knowledge to all partnership staff. Empirical research by Bamber & Elezi (2020b) focused on the three important factors of evaluation associated with performance management and knowledge creation with respect to social capital; monitoring and review meetings and; continuing professional development. The following sections build on that research, which was particularly helpful, as evaluation in Higher Education has been underutilised and often misunderstood. The focus of this chapter is therefore the fostering of communication and learning with underutilised technologies in Higher Education.