In the modern context of education, due to huge and cutthroat competitions among graduating students from various universities of the world, the industry or society expects excellent employability skills from the workforce. The expectation from the hiring process is to get competent graduates who can work with required skillsets and also align with the sustainable growth plan of the employers. Hiring employable graduates looks simple, but it is not true and requires sincere efforts for assessment of if the students are actually demonstrating the skills in addition of excellent academic knowledge. So, this chapter provides an overview of the importance of student learning outcomes (SLOs), their articulation and formulation, and most importantly, the pragmatic assessment of attainment of SLOs using some rubrics or tools. A special mention has been made on a practical assessment of attainment of SLOs in an image processing and computer vision (IPCV) course.
TopIntroduction And Background
Teaching learning process (TLP) is an integral and most important component of any academic organizations in the world. The ways, TLPs are designed, formulated and executed, the organization or university performs accordingly (Aziz et al., 2012; Deng et al., 2003; El-Maaddawy & Deneen, 2017; Jadhav et al., 2020; Maizam Alias, 2005). The success of the universities and student learning outcomes (SLOs) depend on teaching pedagogies (Mathew et al., 2020) to great extent. A student enters into an academic institute with certain goals and later the goals are aligned with student learning objectives through various courses under his programme of study. This becomes extremely important that students are given ample opportunities of learning and appropriate platform for practicing the knowledge gained through various courses attended by the students. The impact of learning or SLOs are determined by the following:
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The teaching-research and lab infrastructure
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Teaching methodologies and pedagogies
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The ambience of the institute and learning environment
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The feedback mechanism and addressing the challenges faced by the students
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Opportunities of “learning by doing”, rather than rote learning
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Many others
The teaching pedagogies are most essential among all the above factors or components on which SLOs are seen if the students are demonstrating necessary set of skills (Chan, 2014; Martin & Mahat, 2017; Nakkeeran et al., 2018; Saeed et al., 2021; Shute & Rahimi, 2017; Surendran et al., 2005) after attending the courses and other teaching-learning activities. The recent pandemic time has taught many lessons to the academic fraternity regarding teaching techniques and now people have started blended learning-based approaches in imparting the teaching and research activities. Whether offline or online, or even blended mode of teaching, the important thing that matters is pedagogies or the methodologies used, tools used and ways in which ICT (information and communication technologies) tools are utilized while delivering the lectures (Deng et al., 2003; Min et al., 2013; Sinha, 2021; Soeiro & Falcão, 2013). On one hand, implementation of new tools and methods are important for better learning and expected SLOs, but on the other hand, assessment of SLOs is equally important if how the methods are bringing changes in students. The pedagogies may vary from course to course; and programme to programme but there must be some common approaches which are novel that aims at developing competence in students after attending a course. As we know that SLOs comprise of course outcomes of several courses, called as COs (course outcomes), and therefore the contribution of each course is of immense importance as the necessary skill set and its development is attributed by learning from all the courses in a programme (BOUKRARA, 2019; Deng et al., 2003; El-Maaddawy & Deneen, 2017; Jadhav et al., 2020; Lingard, 2007; Mathew et al., 2020; Nakkeeran et al., 2018; Reid & Fisher, 2012; Surendran et al., 2005).