Impediments to Sharing Knowledge Outside the School: Lessons Learnt from the Development of a Taxonomic E-Learning Portal

Despite knowledge sharing tools, lack of motivation is one of the primary reasons why organizational knowledge-sharing initiatives fail. In this interpretive case study, we look at knowledge sharing not within an organization, but in the context of schoolteachers and students in Singapore secondary schools. Through interviews with teachers and students, we investigate the reasons behind the reluctance of teachers/students to share educational content outside the school through an e-learning digital repository, and ways to address these. It was found that very real human reasons of fear and trust stand in the way of knowledge sharing. An important contribution of this study is a set of impediments concerning schoolteachers (and students), and potential solutions to these impediments. Despite apparent difference in motivation/time-constraints between organizational employees and schoolteachers/students, the findings support Husted and Michailova’s model of organizational knowledge sharing hostility, and should be useful for application in similar e-learning knowledge-sharing initiatives.