The world is undergoing numerous rapid transitions, whether in education or business. In such a volatile time, the demand for T-shaped skills or T-shaped people is extremely high. The T-shape model is essentially a metaphor used in job recruitment to describe employees’ abilities. The vertical bar on the letter T represents a person’s depth of knowledge and expertise in a single field, whereas the horizontal bar represents a person’s ability to collaborate across disciplines and apply knowledge in parallel areas of expertise.
Companies must improve their competitiveness in this current landscape of socio-cultural, economic, and demographic changes by improving human resources. Outcome-Based Education assists graduates in achieving this goal by combining hyper-specialized knowledge with dynamic and cross-sectional capabilities, as well as by revolutionizing curriculums.
What exactly is Outcome-Based Education?
Before we get into an OBE framework, let’s go over the fundamentals of OBE. Outcome-Based Education is a learning paradigm that focuses on outcomes or goals rather than results for those who are unfamiliar with the concept. The educators identify the outcomes as a set number of necessary skills and knowledge that the learner should possess at the end of education. The online assessments, such as exams, assignments, and projects, are then defined to measure the achievement of these outcomes, and the results indicate whether or not the students achieved them.
If the student meets the desired standards in those assessments, their results, which are mapped to the outcomes, will tell us how versed they are and how much they have understood.
And if the student fails to do so, we use feedback to figure out what went wrong. Where do they need extra help, and how should teachers assist them in achieving their goals? Then we gave them another round of assessments. This is known as continuous evaluation, and it is a critical component of a successful OBE framework implementation.
Why Is Outcome-Based Education Practised?
The primary reason is “unemployment.”
Teachers and students put a lot of time and effort into academic lectures that are theoretical in nature.
A significant portion of a parent’s hard-earned money is spent on their children’s education.
The employment ratio is low because of the existing gap between industry requirements and curriculum, which has an impact on skill sets.
This is why it is critical to change educationalists’ perspectives and encourage them to adopt an outcome-based learning system. Aside from academic knowledge, students must gain skills and practical experience to advance in their careers. The OBE framework is designed to fill learning gaps like knowledge, comprehension, analysis, synthesis, evaluation, etc. by working in tandem with Bloom’s Taxonomy Framework.
How Does OBE Improve Education?
There are several aspects of the OBE framework that make it preferable to the traditional model among educators and academics. Here are a few examples.
Learner-centered
Outcome Based Education is purely learner-centered, and the entire educational experience is based on the student’s ability to learn. OBE experts believe that not all students learn in the same way or at the same rate. Rather than providing a standardized model, it accepts diversity in the classroom and employs the element of continuous evaluation to ensure that students achieve the desired outcome at the end of education.
Focus and clarity
Students and teachers can act and strategize effectively to achieve the end goals or outcomes because the outcomes have been defined earlier. Instead of just getting enough marks, there is always a specific skill or knowledge to demonstrate, which will help shift the focus from assessments to learning.
Opportunity
Students will have numerous chances to achieve the outcomes. Marks are merely indicators of outcomes, and learners can express themselves in their own unique way, removing the element of stress from education.
How To Set Up An OBE Framework In Your Organisation?
Implementing Outcome-Based Education necessitates research and background research on your institution and curriculum. However, because you must address the uniqueness and requirements of your institution, each process may differ from what others have done. We will outline some of the steps involved in successfully implementing an OBE framework in your organization.
Examining Your Institution’s Vision And Mission
Learning objectives in outcome-based education must be linked to organizational business goals. After all, the training must achieve some business goal. As a result, the journey truly begins at the top.
Curriculum Assessment
Before you begin, collect data about the curriculum, current institution standards, and stakeholder feedback, and define your requirements for implementing OBE in your institution. This will assist you later in developing strategies, defining outcomes, and measuring their achievement.
Specifying Outcomes
The following step is to specify the outcomes. Define the goals and skills you want the students to achieve based on the requirements you gathered from stakeholders and the needs of the institution. There may be some major outcomes that will be measured over time, as well as some shorter outcomes that will help you measure their achievement rate in the short term so that you can improve and change the teaching-learning methods as needed. We’ll go over this further when we talk about accreditation workflows.
Collaboration
Effective communication between stakeholders and decision-makers is critical to OBE’s success. Allow all departments, parents, students, industry experts, and key decision-makers to weigh in on each step. This will assist you in bringing clarity to the process and ensuring the success of OBE implementation.
Subset Mapping Of Outcomes
After you’ve defined the outcomes, determine the relationship between major outcomes and short-term goals. If you want the student to express an environmental consciousness, you can set a short-term goal that counts the number of times the student participated in such activities during the course.
Identifying Contributions From Assessments And Outcomes
You now have your results. The following step is to define the contributions from assessments such as exams, assignments, projects, and so on. Document and map the level of achievement as determined by the assessment results. This means determining an outcome’s attainment based on how well students performed in an assessment measuring that outcome.
Feedback And Ongoing Evaluation
As previously stated, a continuous evaluation is an important aspect of OBE. To ensure that the students achieve the outcomes, you must collect feedback and improve at every step of the way. Make any necessary changes and edits to your plans based on the results.
How are we dealing with OBE nowadays?
With Automation, we can design the best solution for OBE Implementation!
Manual student data management and performance tracking can be streamlined with outcome-based education software. This software not only allows the faculty to map and measure everything but contributes from student enrollment to their entire college journey without any errors.
