Co-designing a knowledge management tool for educator communities of practice

Knowledge management involves fnding, expanding, and using knowledge in an organisation to achieve goals. Its role is crucial in higher education to improve problem-solving, research, and teaching by acquiring, sharing, and applying knowledge. Higher education institutions can promote knowledge management through Communities of Practice, but doing so remains challenging due to cultural, organisational, and technological reasons. We present fndings of the frst step of co-design workshops with authentic higher education teaching teams that sought to understand (a) their practices as a community and any motivators and impediments to their community development; (b) how they perceived the tools they use for knowledge management; and (c) the kinds of tools they believed could help them better conduct knowledge management and develop as Communities of Practice. Our fndings suggested four essential design requirements and informed our development of a new tool to support the knowledge management needs of higher education teaching teams.