In this article, we present an engineering knowledge management methodology that aims to improve the quality of services of educational institutions. We first define educational institutions as agencies in a service industry that provide knowledge accumulation and dissemination services to their surrounding society. We then leverage the conceptual framework originally proposed by a Constitutional Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig, in the book “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace”, to control the quality of services on knowledge management. We found his conceptual model of the four forces particularly suitable for understanding the complex interactions between technical content knowledge and the motivational forces in human societies. Based on this four-force model, we will use the design and implementation of a series of engineering courses at Tsinghua University to illustrate the concept.
