Outcome-Based Education

OBE Development at HKUST

Since the University Grant Committee (UGC) launched an outcome-based education (OBE) campaign to promote OBE at its funded institutions, HKUST has started the OBE Project in 2007.

Spring 07

• Briefing sessions were conducted for each School
• OBE Steering Group, which include the representatives from the four Schools, was formed under the Senate Committee of Teaching and Learning Quality.
• The desired Attributes for the HKUST undergraduate, ABC-LIVE was drafted.

Fall 07

The undergraduate Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs) of each school was also drafted in alignment with the Graduate Attributes. ILOs for

• School of Science
• School of Engineering
• School of Business and Management
• School of Humanities and Social Science

Spring 08

• Feedback on HKUST Graduate Attributes and School ILOs was collected from key stakeholder groups, including employers, alumni and students.
• Development of departmental ILOs was started in each department.

Summer 08

• Mapping of existing practices with the proposed ILOs within Schools was carried out.
• Representatives from academic support units, including the Language Centre, the Library and the Student Affairs Office, were brought into the discussion in the OBE Steering Group.
• Academic support units started setting their ILOs and mapped them out with their current instructional activities.

Fall 08

• Pilot OBE Course Project was launched to experiment the implementation of OBE at course level.
• Development of the ILOs for taught PG courses was started.

Spring 09

• The 1st round of Pilot OBE Course Project took place. Fifty-three teaching staff have participated as pioneers. Pioneer feedback was collected through sharing sessions and student feedback was collected through an online mid-course survey.
• The School of Engineering developed software called PACOS (Program and Course Outcomes System) to provide a centralized, web-based database for OBE information.

Fall 09

• The 2nd round of Pilot OBE Course Project is still on-going. Additional 59 pioneers have joined. Similarly, sharing sessions have been organized to get pioneer feedback. Student feedback will be collected by online survey for twice, one in the middle of the semester while another one at the end.
• A pilot assessment plan has been designed to measure success in enabling students to achieve the intended learning outcomes. Each School, Library, the Language Center and the Student Affairs Office will respectively focus on a particular generic outcome and pilot an assessment of it. Departments will also focus on the assessment of a program-level outcome, which is usually critical thinking. A sharing session was held in January 2010 to mobilize the contributions of involved units.