Moving towards outcome-based education — Faculty development initiatives

The National Accreditation Board in India has recently adopted the Washington Accord Graduate Attributes and has mandated all colleges offering the Bachelor´s program in Engineering to prepare accreditation based on Outcome-based Education (OBE). Given that the Indian school education, by and large, is not outcome-based, it is quite challenging to implement OBE at college level. Both the students and faculty do not have a frame of reference for this type of learning. The college whose case study we are presenting does not have autonomy in curriculum and in student admission process. We present in this paper our challenges, particularly in preparing the faculty to teach using OBE, as we believe they are the key elements. We have evolved a system by trying well researched best practices and customizing them to our situational factors. Some components of the system are in a nascent stage. We present the basis of the OBE in section I. The Indian engineering education system is briefly described in section II to prepare the ground for our situational factors in section III. We outline the initiatives at our college and some conclusions from these initiatives later in the paper.