Knowledge Ticket System - A Knowledge Broker for Universities

Knowledge at universities is traditionally transferred from lecturers to students during lectures or (for quite a while) within virtual learning spaces. Students are responsible for learning and practicing difficult learning matters by themselves or in small, often self organized study groups. Regarding the coincidental formation of study groups knowledge within universities is unequally distributed and cannot be used optimally. The core idea of this paper is a knowledge ticket system for universities, a platform for the exchange of knowledge and expertise to foster communication between students and to strengthen the team spirit at universities. Virtual tickets represent the currency needed for every exchange. The allocation and transfer of tickets is modeled using Petri nets. The sophisticated broker, feedback, rating and reward functionalities are described and explained. We focus on knowledge mediation in personal learning environments. Concluding, we propose an implementation of the knowledge ticket system within a portal technology. The outlook comprises several future scenarios for introducing the proposed knowledge ticket system at universities.