Implementation Challenges and Opportunities in the Outcome-Based Education (OBE) for Teaching Engineering Courses: A Case Study

Abstract

Outcome-based education is a closed-loop control system accepted globally for enhancing the teaching-learning processes. However, the success of the system is not prominently visible in fresh graduates. Hence detailed research and optimal process to implement OBE is necessary. This paper aims to investigate the challenges in implementing Outcome-based education and explores opportunities for improvement. Further, pedagogic planning for the analytical subjects has been proposed and the performance of the proposed method is analyzed using a case study. Performance improvement in Course Outcome attainments of the course Antennas and Wave Propagation, offered for undergraduate engineering (ECE) students have been investigated and evaluated in this paper. The investigation shows that dynamically adapting the teaching-learning and assessment methods during the course based on the assessments of the student’s capabilities results in improved performance. The following changes in the system have been suggested for the optimal implementation of OBE. The CO targets for the current semester course should be fixed based on the CO attainment of the previous semester courses of the same batch instead of the traditional way of fixing CO attainment targets. The microanalysis of the end-semester marks and students’ feedback at the ratio of 5:1 may be considered for overall CO attainment computation at the end of the course.