Tracking Student Progress on Learning Attributes for Outcome-based Education (OBE)

Grant program: Teaching and Learning Development Grant (TLDG)

Grant recipient: Krishna Vijayaraghavan, School of Mechatronic Systems Engineering

Project team: Sasan Ebrahimi and Babak Ghorbani, research assistants

Timeframe: July 2017 to April 2018

Funding: $6000

Final report: View Krishna Vijayaraghavan's final report (PDF)

Description: Mechatronics and Engineering Science (MSE) are moving to outcome-based education (OBE) owing to accreditation requirement set by Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB). A brief overview of OBE can be found at http://cll.mcmaster.ca/COU/degree/outcomes.html. Broadly speaking, OBE requires that the learning outcomes for courses be clearly stated and student progress on graduate attributes be tracked and reported. A previously funded TLDG project by Drs. Sparrey & Hindy (View Drs. Sparrey & Hindy’s project) explored OBE implementation in detail and identified a total 75 indicators that would be reported across the program with each course reporting outcomes on 5-6 indicators. The TLDG project by Dr. Sjoerdsma (View Dr. Sjoerdsma’s project) developed a system for faculty members to input/select outcome maps for their respective courses. MSE aims to track the indicators on a scale “Fails expectation”, “Below expectation”, “Meets expectation”, “Above expectation” and “Exceeds expectation”. My TLDG project is a continuation of these previous projects and it would implement the core feature of actually tracking the per-course and program wide student outcome metrics.

Knowledge sharing: A written summary will be provided to MSE and the finding will also be presented in a departmental faculty meeting.

Keywords: Outcome-based education (OBE); Course outcome storage; Outcome tracking for CEAB accreditation; Canvas integration; CAS authentication; Web server; Mysql database