Outcome Based Education (OBE) curriculum was one of the major commitments of the government for the education sector after the 2018 election. OBE is an educational framework where teaching, learning, and assessment are all geared towards achieving specific, clearly defined outcomes. The key aspect of OBE is that it shifts the focus away from what to teach to what learners should be able to do after they have been taught. It has fixed methods and activities to teach, to meet the needs of learners, ensuring they achieve the intended outcomes after the completion of the education programme. The outcomes are often aligned with the skills required in the workplace, ensuring that students are ready for employment or higher education in some cases.

As a developing nation, Bangladesh faced a high level of challenges in implementation as shifting from a traditional education system to OBE requires significant changes in curriculum design, assessment methods, and teaching strategies. Besides, constant assessment of outcomes leads to a narrow focus on measurable skills, potentially neglecting broader learning experiences. However, OBE has been adopted by educational systems in many nations, especially in higher education, to ensure that graduates possess the necessary competencies for their professional fields.

Outcome-Based Education has gained momentum in Bangladesh in the last seven years, especially within higher education institutions as the government's so-called policy was to align its education system with international standards and better prepare students for the global workforce.

The UGC of Bangladesh has been promoting OBE in universities, with many public and private universities starting to adopt OBE frameworks since 2018-19. But the reality is that many educational institutions, especially in rural areas in Bangladesh, lack the resources and infrastructure necessary including IT-based teaching tools, learning materials, and trained faculty, to fully implement OBE.

The main focus of OBE was to improve the employability of graduates by aligning academic outcomes with industry needs, and encouraging graduates to acquire competency standards required in the job market. Definitely, a positive change in higher education was highly expected from the academic arena. Unfortunately, it was limited to developing syllabus, instruction method, and assessment system.
Firstly, UGC started the project by training five teachers from each university. The programme's goal was to organise the nation's existing curriculum in a more outcome-based formula. The assessment system was planned to be divided into two parts -- continuous assessment and final assessment, which were equally distributed. Later, all the universities in Bangladesh started to restructure their traditional syllabi to be in line with the OBE system.

The UGC wanted to produce skilled graduates who were supposed to tackle the challenges of the 4th industrial revolution. This government regulatory body tried to address the diversifying demands of local and global job markets. Before introducing the OBE to the nation, the autocratic Hasina-led government created another body to facilitate it as a sister concern of UGC, named Bangladesh Accreditation Council (BAC) in 2017. The main job of UGC was to provide license/s to the new universities whereas BAC was supposed to evaluate the course curriculum and provide the accreditation of the course if it was based on the OBE guideline.

Based on the Washington Accord, originally signed in 1989, a multilateral agreement between bodies responsible for accreditation or recognition of tertiary-level engineering qualifications within their jurisdictions who have chosen to work collectively to assist the mobility of professional engineers, the Hasina government introduced OBE in Bangladesh as one of the signatory countries alongside Korea, Russia, Malaysia, China, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Japan, India, US, Turkey and the UK.

The Washington Accord was formed for the engineering field, and it is in operation on a trial basis in many countries till today. However, the government of Bangladesh overplayed the experimental ideas in every discipline including arts and social sciences. Science is precise and countable, but social sciences are more qualitative.

The ousted Hasina government led by corrupt ministers and politically motivated education experts proposed such projects as OBE at universities. It created huge budgets and opportunities for misappropriation of funds, and implemented untested methods at the field level, forgetting the fundamental concepts of education, teaching, and learning. Here, the victims are the undergraduate students and the society in general.

It is time to consider other significant issues related to teacher training, curriculum redesign, infrastructural improvements, and policy support, rather than focusing on OBE implementation in Bangladesh. A long-term social and political commitment that involves collaboration among all related parties, including educational institutions, government bodies, and industries, is also required to achieve intended reform and development goals in our education sector.
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The writer is a Project Researcher at the Ministry of Information, and an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Science, American International University-Bangladesh. He can be reached at [email protected]