The relationship between incentives, explicit and tacit knowledge contribution in online engineering education project

Knowledge contribution is a very important issue in online engineering education. This study investigates how to encourage knowledge contribution in a large Asia online engineering education project. Based on long-term empirical research, we found economic incentive is more critical to facilitate explicit knowledge contribution, while social incentive is more important in encouraging tacit knowledge contribution. Moreover, we also found incentives may have different effects due to students' individual difference, e.g., personal value. That is, economic incentive may have positive effect on some students, but none or negative to others. These findings provides some theoretical contributions on e-learning and knowledge management, and also provides some implications for choosing technology in online engineering education system, and designing incentive mechanism.