OBE could be an eye-opener for the Indian Higher Education system, primarily because it is a new paradigm and requires reimagining the entire curricular and co-curricular framework
For SJCON, there were no Indian reference points on OBE implementation in nursing education. It had to be done from scratch and paths need to be cut open.
Objectives:
- Identify skills and competencies required in professional nursing care
- Facilitate holistic professional development by effectively delivering the curriculum and adding on
- Continuously assess the learning attainment levels of students and develop action plans based on the gaps
- Improving upon the curriculum, its supplements and the teaching-learning process, based on the feedback
Implementation of OBE required lot of learning and unlearning. Formal training sessions by experts were arranged for all the teachers.
Defining the learning outcomes (POs, PSOs and COs) was a huge and unfamiliar task, as most teachers never prepared the curriculum before. But this provided huge insights for the teachers and clearly set expectations for students.
Annually, OBE followed these steps:
- Communicate learning outcomes to students
- Prepare/revise and implement outcome-linked, detailed course plans
- Use Bloom’s Taxonomy and measurable action verbs for assessments
- Improvise during assessments, instead of depending on previous assessment patterns
- Ensure that micro-level assessments happen and learning levels, as well as outcome-attainment, are effectively measured
- Identify learning gaps and rectify
- Calculate attainment of COs, PSOs and POs
- Collect feedback
- Improve upon teaching-learning processes, student-centric methods, remedial measures, additional courses and hands-on training programmes, based on the feedback and attainment
Since MS-Excel-based calculation of attainment was very tedious, the deQ software for OBE attainment calculation and analysis is being used now.
