g9toengineering: A Virtual Community of Practice in Knowledge Creation

The concepts of open educational resource and virtual community of practice stem from the need to create a new mode of learning and knowledge creation platforms that complement the classroom environment. This paper aims to find how to take advantage of outcome-based learning to advance development and mastery of competencies, skills, and professional practice as a mediating product in service of innovation. The case of consideration in this paper is an open educational resource (www.g9toengineering.com) developed by the author in 2007 and continuously maintained and updated by students from an undergraduate mechatronics engineering class as an online portal to enable knowledge sharing and transfer basing on the framework of “acquire-reflect-share-apply”. This reflection on challenges of knowledge creation shows in particular how faculty and students collaborate to create their own learning content that is part of their course, then openly share and further develop at no cost and free from licensing obstacles. Results show that students are positive with their own understanding and knowledge building with no clear distinction between the types of knowledge. Some of the challenges of implementation practice are shared in this paper.