A Systematic Approach for Assessment of Attainment in Outcome-based Education

The capabilities expected to be attained by learners, after learning a course or programme, are called course outcomes (CO) and programme outcomes (PO), respectively. The objectives of outcome-based education (OBE) are to ensure realization of grooming graduates with all the theoretical, practical and soft skills required to make them competent and industry-ready professionals. This article discusses the implementation of an assessment system for analysing the attainment of outcomes in OBE. It is a web-based application for evaluating the attainment of COs, POs and programme educational objectives (PEOs) in institutions of higher learning. Recently, OBE and choice-based credit system (CBCS) have become prevalent in institutions of higher learning. The significance and benefits of OBE and CBCS are recognized by all stakeholders, including accrediting agencies. The process for establishing and refining, the vision and mission of the institution, vision and mission of the department offering the programme, COs, POs and PEOs are discussed. The procedure and rubrics for assessing the attainment of the outcomes are also discussed. Accreditation is an honouring mechanism used to assess the standards and quality of the education offered by a programme to a student at an institution of higher learning. The article discusses a systematic approach for assessment of attainment of outcomes by graduates of a programme in an autonomous engineering college following OBE with CBCS.

Learning Management System for Greater Learner Engagement in Higher Education—A Review

Online education helped resume learning that had come to a momentary and uncertain pause with the onset of COVID-19 pandemic across the globe. Since then, learning in many educational institutions continued through synchronous and asynchronous modes, with teaching being undertaken remotely on digital platforms. In this large-scale migration towards online mode of curriculum delivery induced by the pandemic, the institutional learning management system (LMS) had a critical role to play in ensuring uninterrupted learning and student engagement. By drawing heavily from extant works, learnings from MOOC platforms, observations from the LMS applications in corporate training, the present article synthesis the extant literature on how the effective use of LMS can make the learning process interactive, student centric, catering to the needs of diverse learners in higher education.

Beyond Bloom’s Taxonomy: Emergence of Entrepreneurial Education

Twenty years have elapsed since the publication of the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (RBT) in 2001, which has established itself as a major tool for defining the objectives of educational programs worldwide. It is, however, high time to revisit the efficacy of RBT in defining educational objectives of the digital natives. The current article initiates a discussion on an entrepreneurial mode of education, which requires learners to venture beyond the paradigms of RBT. The article is meant to catalyze educational reforms in tune with the anticipated life and work spaces of the age of information and digitalization. It follows a visionary approach and project future scenarios, accounting for the rationale behind those predictions. The article concludes that the digital natives will have to develop a new set of skills that equip them to venture into a holistic and integrated thinking style, which it names as grey/fuzzy thinking and white/fractal thinking, respectively. The conclusions drawn in the article require further validations from field experiments. With those validations, the insights of this article could pave way for a radical transformation of education sector worldwide, bringing about an entrepreneurial paradigm shift in its conception and conduct.

Enabling Social Justice from Within: Reflections on the Student Voice, Pedagogy of Consciousness and the Idea of the University in Democracy

The incidences of suicides by students from marginalized communities at Indian public universities indicate that the structural reforms have been insufficient in bringing social justice at universities and the situation demands a change in cognitive structures and processes that can mobilize shift towards just relations at the universities. This article aims to reflect upon pedagogy of consciousness developed by Paulo Freire and argue for its adoption by teachers to develop student voice that has the potential to bring social justice from within the universities. Following the interpretivist paradigm, the idea of the university given by Kant is explored to locate student voice and social justice within the framework of universities. The idea though places voice at core of university teaching learning process, limits its democratic potential by assuming apolitical role of the universities. Therefore, the author elaborates upon pedagogy of consciousness by Paulo Freire, to bring out its relevance in developing voice for social justice and rethinking the idea of the university. Through the analysis of in-depth interviews conducted with teachers and students at University of Delhi, the voices of students citing incidences of structural as well as epistemic injustice in the University are highlighted to develop the link between theory and practice. These voices point towards lack of spaces for expression of dissenting voices and understanding of these voices by teachers and students from privileged backgrounds. The article concludes with illustrating, how pedagogy of consciousness can develop this consciousness enabling praxis of transformation that brings political dissenting voices to the core of the idea of the university in democracy.

The Effect of Autonomy on University Rankings in Germany, France and China

As previous research has not addressed the relationship between university autonomy and university rankings within countries where the state control model is used, this study explores universities’ strategies to achieve top university rankings in accordance with their autonomous rights and financial as well as political support. Specifically, this article examines the similarities and differences in university autonomy across Germany, France, and China. The results provide a clarified picture for university leaders in other countries to comprehensively understand these elite universities' effective strategies. The findings also reveal that the strategies to obtain a high position in the university league tables differ across the three countries, due to differences in cultural and national characteristics. Despite these differences, the selected countries broadened their procedural and substantive autonomy, used financial incentives to attract outstanding scholars and researchers to improve research capacities, and obtained political and financial support from their governments.

Idea of Pandemic-Pedagogy: Reflexive Rumination on Teaching and Learning Practices

Lately, the debates on teaching-practices in the online mode have given grounds to ask a fundamental question, does pedagogy really matter? For educationists, it surely does. But, what idea of pedagogy prevails upon the pedagogues, the teachers, techno-managerial professors, particularly in the higher education? This article rummages through the contemporary milieu that solicits debate on the idea of pedagogy, by and large marginal in the teaching practices in higher education. The structural academic Brahmanism of the ‘old normal’ has been melodramatically palpable in the time of ‘new normal’ too. In the academic years during the COVID-19 pandemic, a phenomenology of teaching practices occasions a polemical realization about limits and possibilities of pedagogy.

Improving Integrity in CS1 Course Using Formative Assessment and Version Control Tools

There are many grey areas in the interpretation of academic integrity in the course on Introduction to Programming, commonly known as CS1. Copying, for example, is a method of learning, a method of cheating and a reuse method in professional practice. Many institutions in India publish the code in the lab course manual. The students are expected to practice the programs in the manual and write them in the final examination without looking at the reference code. Many institutions apportion some marks for copying the program from the manual to record books. The system thus, inherently encourages copying. The student listens to the program’s explanation in the lecture, practices the same program in the lab, writes the same program in the record book and again studies the same program for the final examination conducted at the end of the semester. This process facilitates students, to some extent, to understand the concepts. However, a significant disadvantage of this system is that most students do not acquire the ability to write programs for authentic tasks. In the context of very rigid laboratory protocols that exist in CS1 courses across most of the Institutes in India, an additional lab protocol that focuses on students’ integrity can potentially improve the quality of learning. This article presents a method of using technology tools to improve integrity without disturbing the existing system.

Assessing Technical Efficiency of the Indian Higher Education: An Application of Data Envelopment Analysis Approach

Due to resource constraints in the Indian education sector, efficiency assessment of the higher education is more essential for the proper allocation and the effective utilization of financial and human resources. Moreover, much of the research in the higher education sector has mainly focused on the quality of education and ignored the role of efficiency. Therefore, the present study analyzes the technical efficiency of the higher education in the Indian states. Secondary data for the study were collected from reports of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), UGC Reports, Economic Survey of India and Reports of the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE). Data Envelopment Analysis was used to analyze the data. The efficiency results suggest that the states analyzed in this study are operating at a moderate level of efficiency relative to each other.