Abstract:

At the University of Applied Sciences (UAS) Technikum Wien, several course programs offer a widespread – especially technically oriented – portfolio from the fields of electronics and computer science to sports technologies or intelligent transport systems. About 700 full- time and part-time lecturers work at the UAS. With their experience they cover a huge amount of different topics in education. On one hand, lecturers impart knowledge through electronic documents, handouts, slides and literature; on the other hand, students generate knowledge during their daily learning. They write seminar works, bachelor or master theses, they do research, prepare reports and presentations or just learn for exams. It would be desirable to keep and prepare all this knowledge for upcoming students in a clear and efficient way. Whilst the UAS worked on the development of appropriate technical frameworks, the question arose if there are possibilities to adapt teaching methods by integrating this knowledge generated by past students? For instance in projects an ordered handover offers possibilities to continue at a point where past students have finished. A simple collection of literary sources belonging to a specific topic can help to start deeper research in that area. Or a well documented and searchable knowledge collection can prevent from reinventing the wheel.

The proposed paper illustrates some ideas and best practices in how to ensure knowledge preservation and knowledge transfer at the UAS. For this purpose, it shows how to use supporting tools and evaluates some teaching methods.

Furthermore the paper gives an overview of discussed approaches for adapted teaching methods based on output from students’ work of previous years. They ranged from using up-to-date technical methods (such as Web 2.0 or collaborative platforms) up to “cross semester teaching” by the students themselves.

Some of the discussed questions are:
• Can collaborative platforms be useful for preserving knowledge?
• Do Web2.0 platforms like Wikis and Blogs make sense?
• Could Twitter or Youtube support transfer knowledge?
• As a teaching method, is it possible that higher semester students teach or coach lower semester students efficiently?
• Which methods can easily help to transfer knowledge inside the UAS?

Keywords:

knowledge management, knowledge preservation, knowledge transfer.