Moving up in quality and excellence

LAHOZ says the search for ways to improve teaching continues.

Educators are always in search of better, more effective and more relevant ways to impart learning.

We aspire to transform students into well-educated graduates who are

experts in their chosen professions, steeped in Filipino family values and with qualities desired by industries. We want them to be capable of contributing to the welfare of the country and the world.

As president of Technological Institute of the Philippines (TIP), I

exert even greater pressure on myself and my academic team to keep searching. After all, technology is changing so fast in scope and complexity.

Finding a better approach to teaching in an engineering and computing school is more challenging than overseeing a chalk-and-blackboard operation in such fields as liberal arts, business and teacher education.

Engineering and computing require huge investments in equipment and software, which have to be continually upgraded. Curricula mandated by the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) change over periods of time, which also require new investments in equipment and infrastructure.

Starting in 2009, TIP upgraded to state-of-the art equipment for its engineering and computing laboratories. Some of the equipment, to simulate actual conditions in the workplace, are the same as those used in the industry.

The search for a better way to deliver education led us to a benchmarking visit with the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) in 2009. CityU had been implementing outcomes-based teaching and learning (OBTL) for three years when we visited.

What CityU shared with us convinced us that OBTL was a model we wanted to adopt. And so we began our own journey to OBTL.

As TIP learned more about OBTL and outcome-based education (OBE), it realized the paradigm shift to OBE provided universities outside the Philippines that pioneered in OBE an edge, excellence-wise, over the others that had not made the shift.

OBE is at the institutional level and OBTL is at the classroom level. OBTL is at the heart of OBE. OBE is the umbrella concept while OBTL fleshes it out.

In OBE/OBTL, there is a shift from teacher and inputs focus to student-outcomes focus.

Journey to OBE

In 2009 to 2010, TIP piloted OBTL in the civil engineering and computer engineering programs in Quezon City using the CityU model. The following year, we implemented OBE/OBTL in all academic programs at both TIP-QC and TIP-Manila.

The shift to student outcomes under OBE/OBTL is TIP’s unique selling proposition that I hope will distinguish our brand in the years to come.

In OBTL, at the classroom level,

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs), Teaching Learning Activities (TLAs) and Assessment Tasks (ATs), or ways of evaluating and grading student work, should all be aligned. TLAs and ATs should work synergistically toward the attainment of ILOs, according to professors John Biggs and Catherine Tang.

Biggs and Tang also say that in OBE/OBTL, the teacher is not… concerned only with the topics to be covered but rather with the desired knowledge, skills and attitudes or student outcomes the students need to exhibit at the end of the course and the practical application of these in their professions.

In a television interview, Biggs had said: “We do not just lecture and talk, we teach in a way that encourages students to learn through their own activities. It is not what we do, it is what the students do, [that is] the important thing.”

Why the shift

As early as 2000, Arthur Levine, then president of the Teachers College of Columbia University, said, “The focus of higher education … will shift to the outcomes that students achieve.”

At that time, I felt it was an idea ahead of its time. Now I understand it in a different light with TIP’s adoption of OBE and OBTL.

In its search for a unique educational model that would address industry needs, TIP has opted for OBE because of its relevance, addressing the age-old gap between what the industry wants from graduates and what schools produce. OBE bridges the

notorious mismatch between industry needs and quality of graduates.

OBE logically begins with the “end in view,” or with what the students should know upon graduation and how they will apply this when they leave school.

Advisory boards

OBE responds to the needs of stakeholders—industry, alumni, faculty and even students. At TIP, these stakeholders constitute an advisory board for each program. Deans and chairs of academic programs regularly meet with the advisory board to review trends in industry and ensure that academic programs remain relevant.

Industries are asked how TIP may further improve its programs. Alumni are asked what might have been lacking in their education and what they think are needed to better prepare students for challenges in their professions.

In that sense, OBE is highly

customer-oriented, focusing on the customers and empowering them.

Feedback from the advisory board is used as input to complete the loop in the Continuous Quality

Improvement process.

Seven lessons

In his commencement address to the University of the Philippines Diliman’s College of Engineering Class of 2010, Jose B. Cruz Jr., the college’s first summa cum laude graduate, listed seven lessons about engineering and computer science education.

1. Engineering is a service-oriented technological profession for the benefit of society and, ultimately, for the improvement of humankind.

2. Engineering is a global profession.

3. Engineering is a team-

oriented profession.

4. Engineering involves technologies that change rapidly, necessitating the development of continuous learning career strategies for engineers.

5. Engineers benefit from social networking at the human interaction level and they tap resources of affinity groups and refine interpersonal skills throughout their careers.

6. Engineers gain from developing effective communication skills. They are among the keys to success.

7. Engineers apply systems thinking to their professional and personal lives.

Cruz, professor emeritus at three higher education institutions in the United States—

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of California Irvine and Ohio State University—emphasized that “engineering technologies are fast changing and growing in sophistication.”

He said, “The best preparation for this certainty of change and innovation is a fundamental engineering education that is deeply rooted in science, mathematics, social sciences, and the humanities to better understand the impact of technology on society and on humanity itself.”

He stressed the need “to

assure the global public that Filipino engineers and providers of Filipino engineering products and services are comparable [to] or better than global standards.”

Cruz’s address made me realize that an effective way to make TIP graduates globally competitive and recognized as such, aside from providing them with OBE and preparing them for local professional licensing examinations, was to seek assessment and evaluation for international accreditation.

Accreditation

The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) is the “global standard in computing and engineering education accreditation.” The nonprofit, nongovernment organization accredits college and university programs in applied science, computing, engineering and engineering technology.

In its search for a better strategy to achieve greater excellence, TIP embarked on ABET accreditation. OBE/OBTL had put TIP in a position to aspire for the international student outcomes-oriented accreditation of 18 of its engineering and computing programs by the US-based ABET.

The simultaneous international accreditation of 18 engineering and computing programs is a first for higher education in the Philippines and a first in Asia for ABET.

Competitive graduates

With Asean 2015 in the horizon, the recent international accreditation of TIP’s programs will definitely make the TIP graduates of these programs very competitive. Asean 2015 is the blueprint for the free flow of goods, services, investment, capital and skilled labor among member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian

Nations (Asean).

The ABET accreditation is one of the best legacies TIP can give its students, who come from the lower and middle income classes. Our financially challenged students in TIP gain access to the best education possible, ABET-accredited programs. This is consistent with the aims of my late father, Demetrio A. Quirino Jr., the engineer who founded TIP 51 years ago.

The international accreditation means “students… increase their access to local and global employment opportunities, as more and more employers prefer graduates from ABET-accredited programs.”

Now that we have OBE and ABET accreditation, I have exhorted the TIP community to continue focusing on student outcomes. At this point, the greater challenge is how to translate these recent developments into actual value-added education for all our students.

We want our graduates to become real nation builders. After all, they are engineers and technologically oriented workers who, by the very nature of their programs of study, have the necessary foundation to convert such aspirations to reality.

Meanwhile, we continue to enjoy the certification of our quality management system to ISO 9001 by Det Norske Veritas for the past 14 years. Our ISO certification ensures that systems and processes are repeatable and predictable, assuring a consistent level of delivery of customer services.

TIP also has a student development program that seeks to inculcate values and a winning mindset in its students.

All these initiatives have brought us to where we are now. The CHEd has awarded TIP-QC autonomous status and TIP-Manila, deregulated status. It has also given us two Centers of Excellence and three Centers of Development.

In the true spirit of continuing quality improvement, TIP shall continue to build on OBE and ABET accreditation to achieve desired student outcomes, even as the school keeps searching for bolder approaches to achieve quality and excellence in Philippine higher education.

The author is the president of the Technological Institute of the Philippines system.