Outcome based engineering diploma curriculum - 2012 Gujarat experiment

In India, unlike the Western world, the universities have several engineering institutes affiliated to them that are geographically spread across large provinces. Gujarat Technological University (GTU) is one such example, that caters to the technical education needs of the state of Gujarat (size of Arizona) with a population of 65 million. More than one hundred such institutes offering undergraduate and graduate programs and about same number of `Polytechnics' offering engineering diploma programs are affiliated to GTU. Around 100 thousand students take admissions every year in the 55 different technology programs being offered. Since examination and certification is the main responsibility of the University, it becomes necessary to conduct centrally administered end-of-the-term examinations every semester. This necessitates the curriculum for each program to be same in all the institutes. Hence, curriculum design became a centralized task to address the needs of today's globalized industry and also fulfill the aspirations and capabilities of the students, belonging to different strata of the society. Since curriculum designers and implementers are not the same in this experiment, a need-based curriculum model became imperative to be developed that could convey clearly and uniformly the intentions of the designers in letter and spirit to all curriculum implementers and stakeholders. In this backdrop, NITTTR Bhopal one of the four premium institutes established by the Government of India for quality improvement of the technical education, was assigned the task by GTU in 2012 to completely re-design the curriculum of twenty five engineering diploma programs to produce `work ready' personnel. The authors were the core members of the core team who undertook this task. This paper highlights the challenges and opportunities faced by the engineering education system due to fast changes taking place in society, industry and education, for which an innovative outcome-based curriculum model was evolved to address these challenges and harness the opportunities. This paper discusses the various facets of the philosophy, approach and structure of this curriculum model evolved for this purpose. It also briefly describes the planning, designing, implementation and evaluation of the curriculum development process, as well as some of the strategies adapted in this innovative curriculum model.