Employers & educators embrace e-learning

"We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from our employees," Cilke says.

Accessing in-house knowledge

While Go Daddy needs to disseminate considerable information to its 18,000 employees, the amount pales in comparison to the knowledge available at colleges and universities. While much of that knowledge is for the benefit of students in a variety of disciplines, including degree and non-degree programs, other knowledge is the basis for research projects. With large faculties, however, it’s difficult for educational facilities to know just what knowledge they have on hand.

At the University of South Carolina, for example, the faculty includes 1,100 members with a variety of skills and knowledge, says Harris Pastides, VP for research and health sciences at the university.

"Complex science and research projects require that a large number [of faculty] work together," Pastides says. Pulling together all of those knowledge assets at the beginning enables the university to make better proposals for research projects.

So the university worked with Collexis to develop a comprehensive, customized knowledge management application software suite based on the Collexis Knowledge Discovery Platform.

"This enables us to better represent who we are to outside businesses and others outside of the university," Pastides says. "It also saves us a lot of time and money in identifying our resources."

By putting in keywords for a project (i.e., chemist, technologist, business), the university can find faculty members with different disciplines who wouldn’t typically work together or even know about each other due to the size of the faculty.

Including all capabilities pertinent to different research projects and grants enables the university to make better proposals, which, in turn, should make the university more successful in its bids, Pastides says.

It’s still too early to tell how much more successful the university will be with the application, which has been in use for about a year. Typically it takes that much time for a proposal to be developed and accepted or rejected by a customer, according to Pastides.

However, the application has helped the university become part of Health Sciences South Carolina, a public-private partnership including other universities in the state. Health Sciences South Carolina is conducting clinical research and health services research throughout the state. According to the partnership, an already funded proposal may soon be mapping the brain’s activity in an effort to treat the effects of stroke. The health services research unit is being developed around research in areas that target clinical effectiveness and patient safety.

The university is also working with Collexis to create a partnership for hydrogen fuel research. Using several different sources of research, Collexis will build a hydrogen-fuel dashboard--similar to a virtual library--that will be available for free to the South Carolina research community and available online, for a fee, to researchers across the world.

 

 

 

 

.