OUTCOME BASED ENGINEERING CURRICULUM DESIGN: A SYSTEM FOR CURRICULUM STREAMLINING AND GRADUATE QUALITY IMPROVEMENT IN ENGINEERING

Traditional methods of developing curriculum includes the transfer of past courses and topics taught in previous years or decades. These courses included in the curriculum were relevant when they were first taught but there is no attempt to evaluate their relevance and there is no justification for their inclusion in the current curriculum except for the historical perspective of the courses being traditional courses for the curriculum of such Engineering disciplines This approach at developing curriculum for engineering education is rapid, easy and less time consuming but it does not lead to the production of graduates who are relevant and current in the state of the are in the work place. It does not allow for the addition of relevant course which can better equip the graduates for the world of work. The previous curriculum focused on ensuring that the students had sufficient information, it focused on what the student were expected to know upon graduation but the advent of the internet made such skill irrelevant as most of the information can be sourced from the internet. This resulted in the production of graduates who needed to be retrained before the can be engaged in the industry. Outcome based Engineering curriculum design championed by the ABET focusses on what the student will be able to do upon graduation. This approach requires that a justification or mapping of each of the courses in the curriculum to the program objective. The courses have to align or satisfy one or more program objectives to be made a part of the curriculum. The blooms taxonomy which is also a key component in engineering curriculum design placed the ability to create as the highest quality that can be derived from the curriculum. A combination of the outcome based curriculum design and the blooms taxonomy will ensure that memory recall courses and topics are kept to the minimum while design based courses are given more prominence. This will enhance the quality of graduate produced especially in developing countries which are yet to adopt the outcome based engineering curriculum design methodology.