Impact of outcome-based education on software engineering teaching: A case study

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of outcome- based education (OBE) on students' learning achievement from a software engineering (SE) program. It is not easy to transform an SE curriculum from traditional knowledge-based education (KBE) method to OBE method since it requires us to identify the outcomes clearly and map the outcomes with the expected capabilities of students. We first give a briefing on our SE program and outline the curriculum, then investigate the impact of OBE in two selected courses in SE program, with the completion of one course being the prequisite for admission into the other one. Experimental results show that OBE can greatly improve the learning effectiveness of students and teaching quality.