Many schools have moved to an outcome-based curriculum, my question is, based on the experience you have at your school, what are the advantages and disadvantages of an outcome-based curriculum?
Many academic disciplines in the United States teach to an outcome based curriculum (.i.e. law school, nursing, MBA programs). This often is motivated by the fact that their graduates must pass a mandated qualification exam in order to be licensed in that profession. Other academic disciplines have adopted all or portions of this idea in order to be relevant to the industry or discipline. A frequent compliant by the more theoretically minded among us is that in these programs, the faculty is teaching to the test. This is due to the success or failure of the students in passing the standardized test determines the reputation of the program in which they were educated.
I think the risk of the outcome-based curriculum is that students may not have the sound foundational knowledge needed to advance their educational endeavors or they may have a challenge trying to fill this gap in doing so.
Best regards,
Debra
Hong Kong provides a good example of the debates surrounding an outcomes based curriculum at the higher education levelArticle Conceptualising quality improvement in higher education: Pol...
It depends on which groups of people you are referring to. Managers, administrators, governments (national and local) would be keen on the metrics that could be generated from an outcomes-based curriculum. This would be useful for controlling the work of teachers, including what they actually teach, the range of outcomes stipulated (I had to have 4 or 5 key outcomes when I was teaching in higher education), and standardisation and 'quality assurance'. Teachers tend to find them restricting (from my experience) and educationally boring and superficial. Students have mixed views. However, the key point, for me, is that IF you are going to have learning outcomes then it follows that there should be student tests to see if they have been achieved, but in my experience this did not happen, so the relationship between students' assessed work and the actual 'outcomes' remained hazy and unsubstantiated. Students, in my view, would not like the requisite tests and examinations to ascertain whether the outcomes had been attained. Ironically, in the department where I worked, we had learning outcomes for each module, but no tests / exams to see if they had been reached, as management policy was to have no examinations - everything was assessed by coursework, placements and groupwork. Thus, the dis / advantages depend on which reference group you are focusing on.
Many academic disciplines in the United States teach to an outcome based curriculum (.i.e. law school, nursing, MBA programs). This often is motivated by the fact that their graduates must pass a mandated qualification exam in order to be licensed in that profession. Other academic disciplines have adopted all or portions of this idea in order to be relevant to the industry or discipline. A frequent compliant by the more theoretically minded among us is that in these programs, the faculty is teaching to the test. This is due to the success or failure of the students in passing the standardized test determines the reputation of the program in which they were educated.
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