Aligning course content, assessment, and delivery: Creating a context for outcome-based education

The emphasis on Outcome-Based Education (OBE) and student-centered learning is an enormous advance in engineering education. The authors argue in this chapter that an essential element of OBE is aligning content, assessment, and delivery. The objective of this chapter is to provide a model for aligning course content with assessment and delivery that practitioners can use to inform the design or re-design of engineering courses. The purpose of this chapter is to help the reader build a foundation of knowledge, skills, and habits of mind or modes of thinking that facilitate the integration of content (or curriculum), assessment, and delivery (or instruction or pedagogy) for course, or program design. Rather than treat each of these areas separately, the authors strive to help the reader consider all three together in systematic way (Pellegrino, 2006). The approach is essentially an engineering design approach. That is, the chapter starts with requirements or specifications, emphasizes metrics, and then prepares prototypes that meet the requirements. It embraces the argument that "faculty members of the twenty-first-century college or university will find it necessary to set aside their roles as teachers and instead become designers of learning experiences, processes, and environments" (Duderstadt, 2008).