Engineering domain expertise through best practices management: Application to the field of education

Best practice (BP) refers to proven practices used by experts in performing a task. A detailed review of previous research shows that knowledge management of BPs is critically important for the success of knowledge sharing and reuse within communities as it will leverage existing knowledge and will facilitate duplicating success experiences. The objective of this paper is to present a BP life cycle development methodology that specifies the required steps for engineering BP to facilitate transforming individual knowledge into public knowledge and making it available to all practitioners. BPs can be successfully shared by establishing an environment in which users, experts and communities can interact and cooperate. The proposed development methodology is implemented as a knowledge management system that promotes and values user contributions. In this paper we present the application of the methodology to the field of education through an implemented system that allow a convenient elicitation and sharing of best practices in teaching.