Knowledge Management for Educators, Entrepreneurs, and Non-Profit Leaders

EDU A613 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Fundamentally, every organization is a knowledge enterprise.  This course shows you how to turn everyday work into reusable knowledge that allows your organization to learn, innovate, and avoid “reinventing the wheel” every year, especially with limited time, money, and staff.  You will learn how education organizations, social enterprises, and non-profits systematically create, capture, organize, and internally share what they know for efficiency and impact.

Working individually and in teams, you will design simple “organizational brains” – knowledge systems that help teams onboard people faster, maintain continuity through turnover, collaborate across countries and time zones, and make better decisions.   Through simulations, case studies, and a semester-long consulting style project with a real or hypothetical organization, you will build a concrete, implementable knowledge management playbook for your future workplace or venture.  

By the end of the course, you will be able to:
•    Describe key concepts – Explain core knowledge management ideas (e.g., tacit vs. explicit knowledge, knowledge conversion, knowledge forms) in clear, non-jargony language;
•    Identify knowledge risks in organizations – Diagnose knowledge-related risks such as key-person dependency, undocumented processes, fragile onboarding, and siloed information, which can hinder non-profits, schools, startups, and social enterprises from gaining or sustaining traction;
•    Facilitate organizational knowledge practices – Implement and facilitate practical routines such as after-action reviews, decision logs, onboarding paths, and communities of practice that make learning part of daily work;
•    Drive adoption and change – Persuade key stakeholders (e.g., founders, boards, senior leadership teams, and staff) to adopt better knowledge practices by framing them in terms of mission impact, scaling and growth, equity and justice, and concrete operational pain points (e.g., burnout, turnover, inconsistent quality); and
•    Create your own knowledge management playbook – Produce a knowledge management playbook for a real or imagined organization that you can use as a portfolio piece in applications and interviews.