The credits have been traditionally acquired based on the hours of participation in teaching-learning process that has been referred as to be input based credit system. It has now been advocated that the credits must be earned as learning outcome for specific qualification pack after acquiring a certain level of performance criteria for expected learning outcomes & the grades may be allocated to the learners for qualitative excellence relative to a standard benchmark.
Maybe I am misunderstanding something about higher education in India, but surely credits are NOT awarded for mere hours of participation, but are awarded based on at least a minimum level of success in assessment.. Could you please clarify this?
Outcome based education (OBE) seems to be a very precise "designing, delivering, and documenting instruction in terms of its intended goals and outcomes". It may seem to be suitable for the STEM subjects in higher education, that measures progress as discrete steps, but it may not be so easily applied to literature and art. But the main disadvantage is that it reduces education to (achieving) 'product', rather than convey the meaning that education is a process (of self realization or 'self actualization', among other things...)
http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/virtual_disk_library/index.cgi/4273355/FID1736/journals/enc2373/2373.htm
When all learning and credits are tied to specific learning outcomes, the result might be atomization and reduction of learning rather than holistic learning.
Also, learning and achievement of units of learning promotes a piecemeal approach to learning. Some students fail to draw the connection between the units and thus may not develop an understanding of the whole.
The paper attached by Miranda Yeoh is very good. I do not have a research article to add only my observations over a 30 year teaching and learning career. For the same reasons that there are multiple learning theories and teaching theories, there will never be a one size fits all answer to educating people. A perfect Outcomes based system could be a good answer but what actually happens is a devolvement into teaching to the content of the upcoming test. Even defining an outcome to measure too is an exercise in the limitations of agreement of what constitutes good in any particular field of endeavor. As long as people are teaching and people are learning there is going to be a need for negotiation and flexibility in methods for a good outcome to occur. The answer would actually be multiple forms of education in different pathways with engaged counselors along the way to assist with navigating learners to the best path for them.
As for the specific question asked; if a person can demonstrate a strong ability to meet the outcome being measured then they should receive credit for that outcome being met. How they acquired this knowledge should not matter. However as the referenced paper states if the education is all outcomes based it is easy to get a fragmented experience which never congeals into useful wisdom. The thing often overlooked in the life experience of education is that wisdom and knowledge are inexorably intertwined but in no way does knowledge increase automatically lead to increased wisdom. There is a definite emotional,and dare I say spiritual component, to wisdom. The wisdom only comes from caring about and sacrificing over the knowledge base to make the connections that lead to the ability to go beyond what was directly taught. This is where the outcomes based evaluations start to fail both as a tool and a goal.
I am not very knowledgable about the way Outcomes based education is applied at Universities, what I do know is that there are many ways to approach OBE and that the one we chose in Queensland Australia in 2000 worked well because it encompassed both the what was known and how well it could be applied. The combination of the two is important. Focussing too much on the 'what is known' leads to a form of competency based education. Adding in the 'How well it is applied' element brings in a cognitive quality aspect that is important for developing, as is suggested above, the possibility of wisdom.
Post script: unfortunately, the OBE system introduced in Queensland was rejected in 2005 for political reasons, a real shame.
Thanks you all for scholary comments. The inputs given and information shared proved very useful to me in drafting policy policy document on credit framework.
Ideally a student of an UG Program should be awarded a Degree if ALL the Program Outcomes (corresponding to Graduate Attributes) are attained to a specified degree. But in India OBE is only on paper and used to apply for NBA Accreditation. No change from student perspective has changed. OBE is not followed by many higher order learning Institutes like IITs, IIsc and others listed in NIRF rankings.
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