ABSTRACT
Engineering universities in the South Asian region have been investigating the efficacy of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) in preparing their students to meet the demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Evaluating students' motivations towards OBE is crucial for its successful implementation into engineering degree programs. This research aims to explore students' readiness towards OBE implementation at one of the prominent engineering universities in Bangladesh. To achieve this aim, an instrument was developed to comprehensively measure students' readiness towards the implementation of OBE. The survey instrument with a 7-point scale, measuring six constructs of the proposed model, such as (a) Students' awareness, (b) Teachers' commitment, (c) Institutional support, (d) Perceived easiness, (e) Students' motivation, and (f) Self-efficacy, was developed and administered to a pilot sample of sixty-eight participants (N = 68) from two engineering domains: Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), and Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). The final data was collected from a cohort of Three Hundred and Seventy participants (N = 370), distributed across four engineering domains. A structural equation modeling (SEM) with the help of the Smart-PLS software was conducted to determine the construct validity of the measurement model and to evaluate the model fit. Results from the analysis indicate no significant positive effect of teachers' commitment (TC) on students' readiness (SR). However, the results reveal a significant positive effect of students' awareness (SA) and perceived easiness (PE) on students' readiness (SR). Results also reveal no significant moderating role of institutional support (IS) on the relation between the exogenous variables (IS, SA, PE) and the endogenous variable (SR). The research recommends Institutional Support as essential for instructors and students to implement outcome-based education (OBE) in engineering education.
ABSTRACT
Due to COVID-19 pandemic, Bangladesh along with most of the developing countries is facing unexpected impediments towards functioning their regular activities. Most importantly, schools at all levels and Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) have been completely shut down since March 26, 2020 that directly obliged stakeholders (Ministry of Education, institutes authorities, parents and other relevant bodies) to adopt online education. Due to having very less experience, in many cases no experience at all, of conducting teaching and learning wholly online by HEIs of Bangladesh, myriad challenges have been encountered by teachers and students. In order to find out a viable technique for dealing with these challenges, this paper addresses two research questions: What are the available open Source technologies that could be used as an alternative of paid LMS system for any developing countries during this COVID-19 pandemic? and Is exiting flipped classroom technique suitable for continuing teaching and learning during COVID-19 pandemic? In an effort to solve the above mentioned questions, a case study method was adopted. The findings of this study propose a pathway (framework) through which the HEIs of developing countries will be able to continue teaching and learning without investing money and organizing training during this COVID-19 pandemic and similar other emergency situations. This strategy provides a simple but reliable emergency means which is based on flipped classroom theory. The HEIs of Bangladesh particularly, and other developing countries generally will be benefited from this proposed framework while they do not have established means to carry their teaching and learning. This paper lastly addresses a few limitations of this framework and provides guidelines to the policymakers on how to incorporate it into the HEIs during this emergency context.
