A review Assessing the role of Communities of Practice as a tool for managing knowledge in Indian higher education

Abstract

Knowledge and information transfer have become important ingredients for an organization’s competitive advantage. Knowledge management has emerged as an overarching strategy to enhance organizational performance and promote innovation. This strategy is implemented in most organizations through the creation of Communities of Practice (CoP). These are networks of individuals with a common, shared purpose grouped together to facilitate knowledge building, idea creation and information exchange. Actively engaged CoPs can greatly help in collectively constructing new knowledge and transferring it to new members. Using the readily available online tools today, new knowledge networks can be created quickly and knowledge can be disseminated effectively beyond the community boundary. Educational institutions in India have grown in quantity, however they grossly lack in the quality. Quality plays an important role in higher education in today‘s globalized economy and in the need to build a knowledge society. With India poised to becoming a global superpower the quality of higher education in general and technical education in particular needs to be greatly improved. The purpose of this paper is to discuss knowledge management (KM) as a solution to enhance the organizational knowledge. More specifically, CoPs can assist in developing the faculty and improving the teaching and research practices in higher education in India.