National Board of Accreditation (NBA), India became the permanent signatory member of the Washington Accord on 13th June 2014 and laid down a set of specific guidelines for the institutes in India to achieve Outcome Based Education (OBE). This involves framing cohesive Program Education Objectives (PEOs), Program Outcomes (POs), Course Outcomes (COs), and ensuring assessment and attainment of these outcomes. Institutions adopting and implementing OBE through manual processes typically face the following challenges:
1. Involving all the faculties in appropriate roles
2. Faculty time and resources involved in documentation
3. Non-uniform process practiced in establishing curricula and calculation of attainments at various outcome levels
4. Inadequacy of mapping between CO and PO
5. Overwhelming volume of data across batches
6. Complex data analysis to isolate problem areas
7. Generating the Self-Assessment Report (SAR) in a timely manner
An innovative software platform, IonCUDOS is designed to address all the above issues.
Curriculum management system of IonCUDOS.
Curriculum Management System
Mainly focuses on curriculum design enabling faculties to create appropriate lesson plan, frame COs and mapping COs to POs and frame question banks. The curriculum delivery and assessment methods followed by the institutions will be intact and the software platform is compatible with all the delivery and assessment methods followed by the institutions and generates reports for students’ attainment, Course Outcome (CO) attainment, Program Outcome (PO) attainment and Program Education Objective (PEO).
IonCUDOS OBE platform helps institutionalizing OBE practices, achieving transparency, optimizing data inputs, standardizing computation of attainments, isolating areas for improvements, trends from large historical data from batches, and generating Self-Assessment Report (SAR) in a timely manner.
MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF IonCUDOS
OBE follows a continuous improvement model and IonCUDOS is also built on this continuous improvement model as shown in figure below.
Continuous Improvement Model
The inputs to the IonCUDOS are the vision and mission of the institution along with the department, stakeholders’ expectations and needs of accreditation. The outputs from IonCUDOS platform are various attainment reports, students’ success reports and performance indicators and exhaustive reports to the key sections of NBA SAR. The subsequent sections describe the main features of IonCUDOS.
Curriculum Design
The curriculum in IonCUDOS is created by the Head of the Department (HOD) feeding PEOs, POs and mapping between PEOs and POs. Afterwards, faculties are allocated specific subjects. The faculties will then login and create a lesson plan and frame the course outcomes (COs) and perform the mappings to the program outcomes (POs), frame Topic Level Outcomes (TLOs) and map TLOs to COs, frame competencies and performance indicators.
Delivery Planning
Faculties while framing COs specify the delivery method used to deliver each CO to the students and also specify the appropriate Bloom’s level for that particular CO. This process helps to maintain consistency in delivering the curriculum.
Assessment Planning
Once the curriculum is delivered to the students and assessments are be conducted. This requires assessment planning and use of rubrics indicating how students are assessed for a particular course. Different methods can be used to assess students like class tests, final exam, quiz, assignments, mini projects, seminars etc. Faculties will prepare question paper indicating CO, Bloom’s level, performance indicator for each question.
Attainment Calculation
The parameters required for the calculation of attainment of outcomes are shown in figure below.
Attainment parameters
TEE – Term End Evaluation (Semester), CIE – Continuous Internal Evaluation (Tests)
For attainment calculation direct and indirect approaches are used. The direct attainment comprises of results from class tests and final exam. Indirect attainment consists of various surveys like CO exit survey, PO survey, alumni and employer survey etc. Final attainment is calculated by considering a percentage weightage of both direct and indirect attainment.
For the calculation of attainments two methods are considered as shown in figure below.
Approaches of Attainment Calculations
Method 1 is used when student wise question wise marks are available, typically suitable for autonomous colleges, private/deemed universities. Method 2 is used in affiliated colleges where the student wise question wise marks are not available. In this case, CGPA or final exam marks will be used with class test marks to compute attainments.
Survey and Feedback
Survey and Feedback module facilitates the institute to conduct various survey like CO exit survey, PO survey, alumni and employer survey etc. Institutes can customize the survey templates and conduct their own surveys. IonCUDOS will calculate indirect attainments based on the inputs from the survey questionnaires.
WHY IONCUDOS IS REQUIRED FOR AN INSTITUTION?
1. Process institutionalization
IonCUDOS software maintains the PEO, PO, CO and TLO and their respective mappings and attainment calculations of each and every program of the institute/university for every curriculum on per year basis.
2. Creation of NBA SAR report
IonCUDOS software generates NBA SAR report in a single click!
3. Assistance for data collation for SAR
• IonCUDOS platform helps in preparation of SAR by providing actual NBA template
• Provides standard content in administrative sections of SAR
• Provides complete OBE mappings and attainment analysis for SAR
• Provides feedback mechanism through surveys and publish the data in SAR
4. Continuous reviews and refinement
IonCUDOS platform provides freedom and scope for continuous review and refinement of PEO, PO, CO and TLO for every curriculum on per year basis. This saves lot of manual entry for facilities.
BENEFITS OF IONCUDOS
A survey was conducted to measure the impact of IonCUDOS and was administered to 100 faculties of the institute. The survey was conducted two times i.e. before and after installation of IonCUDOS. The survey results revealed that IonCUDOS benefitted the institute in the following areas:
Efficiency: IonCUDOS helped in achieving the error free attainment calculations as it eliminates the manual calculation using spreadsheets.
Speed: IonCUDOS generates various reports such as CO-PO, PO-PEO mappings, program articulation matrix, lesson plan, question paper analysis, various attainment reports, survey reports in a click of button. This saves lot of time for HOD and faculties. Hence eliminates the manual work.
Productivity: IonCUDOS helps to increase the productivity of the faculties as the manual work is eliminated and data is stored and retrieved in a safe and secure manner. Faculties can focus effectively on their other responsibilities.
Security: The data of the institution remains safe and secure in IonCUDOS as the software platform provides access to the various stakeholders in a level based, privilege based manner.
Process Institutionalization: IonCUDOS helps the institution to achieve process institutionalization of common practices across different programs by bringing all of them under one umbrella.
A comparative analysis of benefits of using IonCUDOS is shown in table below
Table: Benefits of IonCUDOS to the institution
| Efficiency | Speed | Productivity | Security | Process Institutionalization | |||||
| Before | After | Before | After | Before | After | Before | After | Before | After |
| 52.3% | 78.5% | 34% | 79.5% | 42.5% | 74% | 46% | 86% | 64.6% | 87% |
