STUDENT’S PERSPECTIVE ON OUTCOME BASED LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A STUDY ON AN AUSTRALIAN OFFSHORE CAMPUS IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

This paper discusses the student’s perception and understanding about the outcome-based learning and their awareness about the learning outcome of the units and its usefulness to a practical situation. This study also considers gender wise and department wise perception to understand the different aspects related to learning outcome. The study was carried out among 205 engineering and business students selected from all years of study in an Australian Offshore campus in Malaysia to determine students’ perspective on outcome-based learning. Although majority of the students, irrespective of stream of study and gender, understand that unit outlines contain the learning outcomes, half of them reported having not read it at all. Majority of students read information about the unit, half of the students do not read information about lecturer and do not give importance to University graduate attributes which is explained in the unit outline. Almost all students tend to give importance to program schedule and calendar. The independent t test was used to understand different aspects of students’ perspectives about leaning outcome and how they conceived it, gender wise and department wise. Results indicates that there is no difference in means score of male and female students in various aspects of learning outcome. No significant difference was found in attaining various aspects of learning outcome irrespective of the stream of study.