Fostering Knowledge Sharing in Education-as-a-Service Communities: A Learning Management System for Lecturers

Digital learning assets (DLA), like documents or system accesses, and scientific papers are omnipresent within the academic world. Therefore, academic communities of lecturers centered around Education-as-a-Service (EaaS) providers need a platform to upload or link their assets in one place. In our paper, we design, implement, and evaluate a new learning management system (LMS) specifically for lecturers following a design science research approach to perform a proof of concept and to assess the acceptance within the community. We gather the requirements for this LMS by performing a literature review, and afterward, we build a web application as an artefact prototype and evaluate it in an exploratory focus group. The developed LMS covers basic functionalities, user control, and collaboration tools to support communication between lecturers. Other features include the upload and management of courses and their contents. An innovative aspect of this work is individualized content provision based on the learning asset’s metadata. Currently, the underlying algorithm takes the chosen keywords into account, but additional meta-fields can already be gathered for further development. The prototype evaluation resulted in a system usability score of 63, which can be considered good, and the product received a positive acceptance among the evaluation participants. With our work, we contribute to both theory and practice, by providing a requirement framework for an LMS for lecturers and by implementing a knowledge sharing fostering prototype for an academic community centered around a German Education-as-a-Service provider.