Development of OBE Evaluator

Abstract

Pakistan Engineering Council (PEC) has recently introduced Outcome Based Education (OBE) system in universities. In OBE system, Program Educational Objectives (PEOs) and Program Learning Outcomes (PLOs) for each academic program and Course Learning Outcomes (CLOs) for each course have to be explicitly defined. In this system, in addition to meet the minimum requirement of Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) for attaining a bachelor degree, student is required to pass each CLO and PLO during studies. Attainment of PLOs and CLOs is assessed through exams such as assignments, quizzes, mid and end semester exams, course projects, viva, final year design and research project etc. Progress of each student has to be tracked, recorded, evaluated and monitored during the studies. In OBE system, universities have to prepare and maintain two types of results: (1) CGPA, (2) attainment of CLOs and PLOs by each student. Preparing, evaluating, maintaining and tracking these two kinds of results manually is not only time consuming but very tedious. Thus, there is a need to develop a user friendly software for evaluation and effective implementation of OBE concept in the universities. In this project, a software named “OBE Evaluator” has been developed for evaluation of an academic program, courses and students’ performance in OBE domain. Software enables recording, evaluating, tracking and monitoring attainment of CLOs and PLOs by each student and by the cohort at any stage during the course of study. Most of the input in the software is automated. Students’ enrollment data, students’ marks etc. can be imported through excel files. Software imports excel files exported from CMS or other similar software being used for award of grades in different courses. Thus, data (such as students’ enrollment, students’ marks in various exams) has to be input in CMS for award of grades and can then be exported to OBE Evaluator. OBE Evaluator can also automatically generate Continuous Quality Improvement actions. OBE Evaluator has been developed using C-Sharp programming language. Software is very simple and user friendly and can be adopted for OBE evaluation