The OBE challenge to...curriculum design and documentation

Not so long a go, an enthusiastic academic staff member decided to make some changes to the way he was teaching in order to move to a more outcomes-based education (OBE) approach for his students.

He had thought long and hard about what students were learning and how they were being taught and assessed. Secretly he admitted to himself that, although what he did was effective, there was always room for improvement and the push to OBE was as good a time as any to revisit his teaching. He talked to colleagues and attended some staff development sessions to help him look at what he was doing with fresh eyes.

He was challenged by a series of questions:

1. What were the outcomes he wanted? What did he expect his students to be able to know, value, do and understand at the end of his unit that they couldn't do before?
2. How were the students going to prove to him that they had achieved these outcomes? How was he going to clearly link the assessment to each of the outcomes?
3. What teaching and learning activities was he going to cover over the semester so the students could move from where they were now to where he wanted them to be?

Writing out the explicit statement of outcomes (or aspects of them) was a useful exercise in clarifying what he wanted the student to achieve. How to assess the outcomes was more challenging especially including the assessment criteria in the unit outline so students knew what they were expected to achieve. He wondered if that would mean they wouldn't ask him as many questions about the assessment?

He planned to deliver a lot of the content online and wanted to integrate more group work and interaction into the face to face sessions. Instead of a series of weekly lectures and tutorials, he wanted to have a one hour lecture in each third week with a series of two hour workshops in the intervening weeks. He wanted to introduce some authentic assessment activities that would culminate in a final project that would replace the exam.

He realised the handbook had already been published with the details of units specifying that his unit would have twenty six hours of lectures and three hours of tutorials. The assessment stipulated the final exam and in-class tests and assignments. Now what should he do? Trying to work within the timetabling constraints to cater for his flexible lecture and workshop arrangements was proving a nightmare. Would he have to wait until next year to implement his new ideas because the administrative structures and procedures were obstructing change?