On May 8-9 2015, the British Council teamed up with STI to develop and deliver a training programme that focuses on outcome based education. As a kick off of the first day of training, a British Council-STI Operational Alliance Agreement was signed by Nick Thomas, British Council Country Director and Monico Jacob, STI President. The agreement reinforces the commitment of the British Council to provide technical expertise to the project while STI commits itself to implementation of an outcome-based assessment starting with next year’s piloting of the Senior High School. Graham Norris, Assistant Director of Education Scotland, was brought in by British Council to serve as the technical expert. 

Outcome based education (OBE) is an approach that uses the ultimate goal or outcome as the basis for the teaching and learning method as opposed to the traditional education system of using grades and rankings as an assessment tool. According to Graham Norris, OBE anticipates future jobs that will be in demand and equips people with skills that can be applied to a wide variety of opportunities. 

Acknowledging that transition from a traditional way of teaching to OBE is a challenge, Graham used a change process approach in introducing OBE and its assessment approaches. Throughout the training, Graham would give the participants thought provoking activities that made them ask themselves how STI can be an OBE-school and what the obstacles would be in order to achieve that goal. 

Overall, on top of the knowledge gained on OBE, STI content developers came up with draft OBE assessment framework anchored on STI’s organizational outcomes – a pioneering effort as STI is one of the very first education institutions which taken a step towards this direction. 

British Council and STI hope to replicate this OBE model to other public and private education institutions in the future, specifically in support of K-12 implementation.   

 

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