In the traditional education system, students are moulded right from their childhood with ‘perform or perish’. Today, we teach students to only ‘get marks’ rather than motivating them for a lifelong yearning for knowledge and skills. The traditional education system focuses on what contents should be taught; it assesses how well students have received knowledge. The outcome-based education (OBE) is a student centred system that is concerned with what students will know and be able to do. It is called an integrated learning outcome (ILO).After teaching, it is assessed how well the students have achieved the ILOs.
In the traditional system, graduates are not completely prepared for the job market with lack of emphasis on soft skills needed in jobs, e.g. communication, interpersonal and analytical skills, and a good work attitude. The OBE lies not in what we teach but ‘what students learn’. OBE emphasises on students learning by utilising student learning outcomes to make explicit what a student is expected to be able to know, comprehend or do, providing positive learning activities that would help students attain the outcomes of the course learning, and assessing the extent to which students meet these outcomes through the use of an explicit assessment criterion.
An OBE system is focused on students achieving outcomes in cognitive, psychomotor and effective domains, especially acquiring the skills of 21st century, such as critical and creative thinking, decision making, problem solving, interpersonal relationship, effective (verbal and written) communication, coping with emotions and stress, self-awareness and lifelong learning.
The Washington Accord is an international accreditation covenant for the undergraduate engineering programmes under the OBE system. The Washington Accord was established in 1989, and the initial signatories were Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States, United Kingdom and Ireland. The Accord, with the goal “Working Together to Advance Benchmarking and Mobility of the Students”, recognises that there is significant equivalency of the engineering programmes accredited by those signatories, and that the graduates of accredited programmes in any of the signatory countries are acknowledged by the other signatory countries as having met the academic requirements for entry in the practice of engineering.
There is a dire need for PEVs to adopt similar concept/understanding regarding each element of OBE while evaluating a programme
The Washington Accord formulated twelve ideal traits called the ‘Graduate Attributes’, which engineering students must earn at the end of their graduation. Graduation from a Washington Accord-accredited programme is passport for engineer’s mobility across a good number of advanced nations and emerging economies. The Pakistan Engineering Council (PEC) started efforts to implement OBE under the Washington Accord in programmes at the engineering institutions of Pakistan in 2007, and achieved the provisional signatory status of the Washington Accord of International Engineering Alliance (IEA) in 2010.PECbecame the full signatory to the Washington Accord in 2017 among its twenty signatories.
In recent years, professional preparation of engineers at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels has undergone significant changes due to a variety of factors including knowledge explosion, new tools and techniques of teaching. A key new element has been interdisciplinary redesign of engineering programmes by PEC where a team of scholars from different disciplines of knowledge design and implement programmes. Starting from 2007, PEC has conducted a series of training workshops for the engineering faculty to train them to implement OBE in engineering programmes.
PEC serves to facilitate the engineering institutions to meet the minimum standard stipulated for the accreditation of their existing engineering programmes or newly proposed programmes. From 2016 and onward, all institutes of higher education (IHEs) offering engineering programmes are required to implement OBE in order to get a PEC accreditation. Currently, fifty-three IHEs are being accredited for different engineering disciplines under the OBE system (level two) for one or two years, while the maximum allowable accreditation for level two is five years.
The outcome-based assessment (OBA) emphasises on elements of programme learning outcomes required in the engineering curriculum and to adopt continuous quality improvement (CQI) procedures covering OBE. PEC has a pool of senior academic experts called programme evaluators (PEVs) who are responsible to evaluate the respective programmes at engineering institutions during an accreditation visit. PEC has also conducted a number of training workshops for capacity building of PEVs with the help of experts nominated (Washington Accord mentors) by the Washington Accord.
Beside the continuous efforts made by PEC, the concept of OBE/OBA is still ambiguous to the stakeholders. There is a strong feeling among the engineering faculty across the country that all PEVs have their own explanations towards different elements of OBE that hinder them to devise an effective OBE system at their respective departments. There is a dire need for PEVs to adopt similar concept/understanding regarding each element of OBE while evaluating a programme. PEC needs to develop a uniform evaluation manual for PEVs similar to the Accreditation Manual (2014; V1.1).
PEVs need to come on one page regarding the evaluation standards and OBE concepts so that the confusions on OBE can be rectified. Complex engineering problem solving and project oriented problem based learning are the two major concepts of OBE system that are most ambiguous to the engineering faculty across the country. More extensive training sessions, both for faculty and PEVs, are needed to facilitate engineering institutions to adopt CQI of the Washington Accord graduate attributes covering the OBE procedures in true letter and spirit.
The writer is an associate professor at the Department of Chemical Engineering, COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus