Knowledge Management in the E-learning Project of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Florence

In 2002,the University of Florence Medical School developed an e-learning project aimed at creating an online Curriculum in Medicine and Surgery as a support to conventional teaching. From the early phases of the project, one of the major difficulties that had to be faced was the acquisition, on the part of teachers, of the Knowledge and abilities needed to interact with students and to produce courses in the e-learning mode. To solve this problem the Florence Medical School deemed it necessary to provide the teaching staff with a typology of easily codified, re-usable and explicit knowledge template, appropriately suitable for Information Technology. To achieve this aim a people to document knowledge Management approach, described in this paper, was adopted. This consisted in the planning and realization of a multi-medial virtual laboratory to furnish a knowledge-base from which teachers could extract elements of knowledge. This paper also describes how the database can start a virtuous circle of knowledge creation that amplifies the intellectual capital of the Faculty. The number of online courses already activated in the Florence Medical School provides evidence of the fact that Knowledge Management is a discipline applicable not only to business communities but also to other organizational settings, of which the academic one is a good example.