Knowledge sharing portal for international postgraduate students in UTM

Abstract

The evolvement of information and communication technology (ICT) gave the organization an opportunity to enhance their services and productivity. One of the ICT tools is knowledge management. Knowledge management is a process of organizing, identifying, and sharing knowledge either tacit or explicit experience, and expertise that typically resides within individuals in an organization. Equally fundamental, in the information society, is the sharing of knowledge between people in different locations. The purpose of this research is to help foreign postgraduate international students to overcome their academic and non academic problems during their study at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM). Identifying the appropriate requirements needed by these students in UTM will help this research to achieve that object. Therefore, this research proposed a portal to serve as a knowledge sharing platform for the foreign postgraduate students in UTM. By using questionnaires and doing interview with the international students as a methodology, the main findings of the study which are the knowledge and information that need to be shared among the foreign students are studied. The data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 16.0. These findings were then incorporated in the form of a prototype web-based Knowledge Sharing Portal. In structuring the portal prototype, the portal was developed using PHP, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX, My SQL, and Rational Rose. Due to the development of this portal, it is expected to gain a lot of benefits in solving the community members problems and enhance and facilitate knowledge sharing among the students.