Aquinas College of Higher Studies (ACHS) organized a Webinar on Curriculum Development and Outcome-Based Education on the 28 th of October 2021. The purpose of this webinar was to assist in the development, review, and refinement of the degree programmes offered by the ACHS./p>
The Resource Person was Dr. Thusitha Rodrigo - a Senior Academic who is one of the main consultants of Aquinas College of Higher Studies.
Curriculum development is the process by which the university assures the quality of the courses that it offers to students. The university achieves this by allowing changes to courses to ensure that the content is updated to reflect current academic knowledge and practice, and also by ensuring that the structures are used to provide the best learning experiences possible for students.
Outcome-Based Education, widely known as OBE, has become a curriculum byword across the disciplinary spectrum in higher education. OBE is a student- centric teaching and learning methodology in which the course delivery, assessment is planned to achieve stated objectives and outcomes. It focuses on measuring student performance i.e., outcomes at different levels.
Dr. Thusitha successfully covered the topics including identifying programme outcomes using a graduate profile, identifying the content of individual curriculum units to ensure that all programme outcomes are covered, sequencing the content / units, identifying lessons and their content for each unit, converting lesson content into objectives, identifying appropriate delivery method(s), using appropriate assessment method(s), and deciding on the unit outcomes by collating lesson objectives under Curriculum Development and important aspects of OBE, the difference between conventional education and OBE, Blooms Taxonomy, The objectives of the QMS, Levels of Qualifications, the minimum volume of learning required for each Level of SLQF, SLQF Levels with Comparable Levels of NVQF, Learning Outcomes, K-SAM Model, and definitions of Active Hours (AHs) and Academic Credits (ACs) under OBE.
The webinar was helpful for the faculty members, administrators, and Faculty Senate members with the overall guidelines for the review and design of degree programmes and courses. It also provided a description of the review processes and procedures for obtaining approval of proposals. These guidelines suggest a format that faculty and curricular review bodies use in their deliberations on programmatic proposals. It was ended with a Q & A session.
