Effective Reuse and Sharing of Best Teaching Practices

Journal Article

2017

Published in: Computer Applications in Engineering Education

Amal Al-Rasheed, Jawad Berri, 2017

The widespread use of computer technologies in education has reshaped the roles of instructors,
who are encouraged to innovate interactive forms of technology-supported instruction that promote participation
and collaboration. This in turn engenders new experiences of teaching that need to be gathered and capitalized as
teaching assets to be shared among communities of instructors. Among these experiences, best teaching practices
(BTPs) are instructional practices accumulated in teaching that have been proven to work well, give good results,
and can therefore be recommended as a model. Identifying and sharing best practices means duplicating successes
which help instructors learn from each other and deliver better quality teaching. This paper presents a knowledge
management framework for acquiring, coding, sharing, and reusing BTPs. To encourage instructors’ participation,
the framework is based on peer scoring of BTPs, which stimulates contribution and interaction. The framework has
been implemented as a knowledge portal that allows instructors to create, store, search, and share BTPs and to
receive feedback and comments from other users, providing many useful functionalities and services to users as
individuals and communities. The paper presents also a real-life case study, lessons learned from using the system
within a community of instructors, and a system evaluation of the effectiveness of reusing BTPs using the reuse
effort and impact metrics.

• Volume Number: 25
• Issue Number: 1
• Pages: 163 to 178