We need to revamp our education system

If you talk to any fresh graduate, they will tell you how unprepared they feel while entering the job market despite having scored sterling grades and rainbow grade points in the university. Employers, too, remain critical of the graduates’ skills, communication abilities and interpersonal traits. An overhaul of the system is surely needed, and if we agree to that, outcome-based education (OBE) may well be the way ahead.
Ever since Pakistan became a provisional signatory to the Washington Accord in 2017, it is striving to shift content-based education to OBE in institutions of higher education across the country. However, this transitioning comes with a huge challenge related to its implementation in society where resources are scarce and novelty is frowned upon.
OBE is a student-centric teaching and learning methodology in which the course delivery and assessment are planned to achieve stated objectives. It focusses on continuously monitoring students’ performance using direct and indirect assessments. This means that at the end of the programme, individuals are able to assess themselves based on the attributes they were expected to develop during the programme.
In a traditional class, instructors focus more on what they have to teach. In the OBE system, they are more concerned about what the students are going to learn from the lectures and will give several tasks to the students to assess the outcome. In this way, at the end of the course, the success depends on how much the students have learnt rather than how much content the professor has taught. This is why the system is called student-centric.
The system took shape in the 1990s, after six foundation signatory organisa-tions from Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States in 1989 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, Bangladesh, China, India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka hold provisional status. To be a full signatory of the programme, Pakistan needs to revamp its university-level education tier and align it with the OBE system. A faculty member in a Malaysian university in 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 emphasis only on academic aspects while neglecting skills. To him, the curriculum was inflexible and prescriptive. Rote learning was essential, and collaboration was extinct. Competition was cut-throat. Most importantly, the traditional system was based on comparing one’s performance to that of the other classmates.
If you are in your 30s, you would remember the result day when parents will consider 92 per cent marks in a subject unimpressive if your classmate or the neighbour’s child had scored, say, 94. In contrast, OBE prepares students in terms of problem-solving skills, enhances creativity, polishes their communication skills, is flexible and is student-centric with a lot of student-teacher interaction.
The ultimate aims of OBE in engineering studies are to equip the undergraduates of an engineering programme with the attributes necessary for them to make the transition from academic to professional life, and be a global engineer.
Effective implementation of OBE gives opportunity for new ideas and challenges to develop an education model that may result in improved learning outcomes. However, for OBE to be successfully adopted at the tertiary level, academic staff and the students must understand the objective of learning and the roles for both instructors and learners.
The education in tertiary institutions should not be a linear, unilateral model. Instead, it should be an active and engaging process ensuring smooth transition to life beyond academics. In the OBE system, 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 tertiary education.
For this system to perform and deliver efficiently, our society needs a strong willingness on the part of the relevant decision-makers and, indeed, the faculty members associated with any institution of unveirsty-level education.
MUHAMMAD ALI FALAK
LAHORE