Abstract

Many organizations have realized the necessity of knowledge management, and university settings are no exception. In a conventional administration of students, decision-making on adequate action—punishment, warning, or penalty—to be taken in cases of student misconduct is often prone to time consumption in accessing relevant information and costly committees’ meetings, and consequently, a prolonged disciplinary procedure. Thus, this work is aimed at the design and implementation of a generic university knowledge management system for decision support on disciplinary procedures (UKMSDP). It modeled an analytical framework depicting the major developmental stages in knowledge management. Explicit knowledge in the research domain was modeled with the aid of ontology. The UKMSDP utilized the K-nearest neighbor algorithm of associative case-based reasoning technique (CBRT) for retrieval of related cases. For the collaboration phase, a group awareness approach was used to manage the interactions among all the decision makers. Web-based technologies, including Java Server Page and Microsoft SQL server, were used to develop the UKMSDP. The current manual committee-based method of decision-making was compared with the UKMSDP. The qualitative assessment validated the benefits of the adoption of KM with respect to the provision of a knowledge sharing and retrieval platform for less strenuous, faster, and more cost-effective decision-making process on matters relating to student allegations. It is no doubt a viable and feasible solution to the difficulties encountered in students’ disciplinary procedures by decision makers. It can be concluded that UKMSDP is a viable alternative to traditional approaches to student disciplinary management.