If you talk to any fresh graduate; they will tell you how unprepared they feel while entering the job market; despite having sterling grades and rainbow grade points in the university. Employers too lament graduates’ lack of skills; qualified communication abilities and rudimentary interpersonal traits. An overhaul is needed, which might come in the form of outcome-based education. Since Pakistan has become a provisional signatory of the Washington Accord in 2017 it is striving to shift content-based education to outcome-based education in institutes of higher education across the country. However, this transition comes with a huge challenge of implementation in our society where resources are scarce, and novelty is frowned upon.
Outcome-Based Education (OBE) is a student-centric teaching and learning methodology in which the course delivery and assessment are planned to achieve stated objectives. It focuses on continuously monitoring students’ performance using direct and indirect assessments. This means at the end of the programme every individual student will be able to assess himself based on attributes he is expected to develop during the programme. In a traditional class, the instructor will focus more on what he must teach. Contrarily in the OBE system, the same instructor will be more concerned about what the students are going to learn from his lecture and will give several tasks to the students to assess it. In this way, at the end of the course, the success depends on how much the students have learned rather than how much content the professor has taught—hence the term student-centric.
The history goes back to the 90s. In 1989 the six foundation signatory organisations from Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States observed that their pre-requisites for granting accreditation to university-level programmes were substantially equivalent. They agreed to grant the same rights and privileges to graduates of programmes accredited by other signatories as they grant to their own accredited programmes. Pakistan among Bangladesh, China, India, Philippines, and Sri Lanka holds provisional status. To be a full signatory of the program Pakistan needs to revamp its varsity education system and align with the OBE system.
N. Rajaee, a faculty member at a Malaysian university, 2013, elaborated on the deficiencies of traditional content-based education which is prevalent in most universities of the country and mentioned the system as rigidly structured with no stakeholder participation in the decision-making process, laying an emphasis only on academic education while neglecting skills. To him, the curriculum was inflexible and prescriptive. Rote learning was a must and collaboration was extinct. The competition was cutthroat. Most importantly, the traditional system was based on comparing one’s performance to his classmates. If you are older than three decades, you must remember your result day when parents will think 92 marks out of 100 as non-impressive if your classmate or neighbour has scored 95!
On the other hand, outcome-based education prepares a student for problem-solving, enhances creativity, polishes their communication skills, is flexible and is student centred with a lot of student-teacher interaction. The ultimate aims of outcome-based education in engineering education are to equip the undergraduates of an engineering program with the attributes necessary for them to transition themselves into a professional career as global engineers. Effective implementation of OBE gives an opportunity for new ideas and challenges to develop an education model which resulted in improved learning outcomes. However, for OBE to be successfully adopted by tertiary education, the academic staff and the students must understand the objective of learning and the roles of both instructors and learners.
Education in tertiary institutions should not be a linear unilateral model but instead an active and engaging process that is a transition for the learners to prepare themselves for the workforce. In OBE, the end of the curricula does not signal the end of the learning process for the students, but a continuum of lifelong learning skills developed in their tertiary education. For this system to perform and grow it demands a strong willingness and generous incentives for the drivers of this concept—faculty of higher education institutes.