Outcomes-Based Education by MARIA ANGELA JOYCE G. MARQUEZ

•Accountability: By providing an explicit statement of what the curriculum is setting out to achieve, outcome-based education emphasizes accountability. The outcomes provide details against which the graduates of the curriculum can be measured and facilitate the quality-assurance process.

•Self-Directed Learning: If students are clear about what they are trying to achieve, they can take more responsibility for their own learning. Outcome-based education thus promotes a student-centered approach to learning and teaching.

•Flexibility: Outcome-based education does not specify educational strategies or teaching methods. What is important is that the students achieve the outcomes and nothow they getthered. Innovation in teaching is possible and also encouraged by this approach and different learning styles can be accommodated.

•Guide for Assessment: As the outcomes are assessed, planning the examinations is clarified. The outcomes provide the framework for student examinations.

•Contribution to Curriculum: Planning Identification of the exit learning outcomes enables specification of phase learning outcomes. The phase learning outcomes lead to the identification of course or module outcomes. The course outcomes lead to the identification of individual lesson outcomes. Outcome-based education is thus a top down approach to curriculum planning that aids coherence and cohesion in student learning.

•Facilitates Curriculum: Evaluation The outcomes provide benchmarks against which the curriculum can be judged.

•Continuum of Education: The outcomes provide pathways along which individuals can progress in basic or undergraduate, postgraduate and continuing education.

•Comparison: OBE provides an opportunity for comparison across institutions. On an individual level institutions can look at what outcomes a student has achieved to decide what level thestudent would be at within a new institution. On an institutional level institutions cancompare themselves by checking to see what outcomes they have in common and find places where they may need improvement based on the achievement of outcomes atother institutions. The ability to compare easily across institutions allows students to move between institutions with relative ease. The institutions can compare outcomes todetermine what credits to award the student. The clearly articulated outcomes should allow institutions to assess the students achievements rapidly leading to increasedmovement of students. These outcomes also work for school to work transitions. A potential employer can look at records of the potential employee to determine whatoutcomes they have achieved. They can then determine if the potential employee has the still necessary for the job.

•Involvement: Student involvement in the classroom is a key part of OBE, students are expected to dotheir own learning so that they gain a full understanding of the material, increased student involvement allows students to feel responsible for their own learning and they should learn more through this individual learning. Another aspect of involvement is parental and community involvement while developing curriculum or making changes to it. OBE outcomes are meant to be decided upon within a school system or at a locallevel. Parents and community members are asked to give input in order to uphold the standards of education within a community and to ensure that students
will be prepared for life after school.

THE DISADVANTAGES OF OBE ARE :
•Imposition of Constraints: Opponents viewed the implementation of the outcome-based approach as imposing constraints on children’s education. Their concern was that education should be open ended, taking the child where he or she was able to develop. While this can be seen as a disadvantage in pre-university education, it is an advantage in health-professions education, focusing attention on fitness to practice.

•Inclusion of and Emphasis on Attitudes and Values Was Inappropriate: Opponents of outcome-based education in pre- university education claimed that “the proposed outcomes watered down academic in favor of ill- defined values and process skills” and that “traditional academic content is omitted or buried in a morass of pedagogic clap-trap in the outcome- based education plans that have emerged to date.” The inclusion of attitudes, values, and professionalism is, however, an advantage in health-professions education at a time when health professionals are being criticized regularly in the media for poor attitudes and a lack of professionalism.

•Inhibition of Learning by Discovery: McKernan argued that education should be valued for its own sake and not because it led to a pre- identified outcome. “To define education as a set of outcomes decided in advance of teaching and learning, conflicts with the wonderful, unpredictable voyages of exploration that characterize learning through discovery and enquiry.” He does, however, accept that this liberal notion of education is more appropriate in the arts and humanities. In health-professions curricula, the graduate must be fit to practice and the emphasis on outcomes promotes this. Curriculum planning is facilitated, making education more efficient as well as effective. The search is on, in many parts of the world, for ways to reduce the training time in many professions, but particularly in medicine, in response to government demand and the need to train increased numbers of doctors. Outcomes provide the framework for efficient curriculum planning in the top-down approach described above.

•North Central Regional Educational Laboratory imparted that one of the disadvantages of outcome-based education cause conflicts with the admission requirements and practices of some colleges and universities.

•Relies on the evaluations that are subjective: some of the outcomes emphasized in outcome-based learning focus on feelings, values, attitudes and beliefs over attaining factual knowledge. Outcome-based education also relies on evaluations that are subjective, rather than objective tests and measurements.

•Outcome-based education is that it weakens local control of education: Those who are against outcome-based education question who decides what the desired outcomes are, as well as how students, individual schools and school districts are held accountable for achieving the outcomes that are set.

•Time consuming: Outcome-Based Education requires that all learning materials be
rewritten which requires a major investment in
time and resources.