Designing for educational outcomes
A large part of the formal education landscape across the world, and also in India, is based on what is called Outcomes Based Education, or OBE for short (nothing to do with the British Empire). But the way it gets implemented on the ground is sometimes mind-numbingly tedious and only promotes a toxic compliance-driven culture, rather than nurturing a culture of inquiry. One of the first mistakes we do is to equate "outcomes" with "exam performance" and argue for all of education be designed around examinations. We even hear weird axioms like "assessments drive learning". It is one thing for assessments to assess learning-- but once they start driving our learning, we have lost the very reason why we are educating the population in the first place. This culture has also completely taken out the emphasis on learning, in classrooms. Most of our courses today start as a contractual agreement where we first present the assessment model, exam pattern, etc. an...