PDC Course Development and Assessment Process for the betterment of Teaching-Learning Process

Outcome-based education is being adapted in most of the engineering colleges across India. This process is being accredited by a national body called National Board of Accreditation (NBA) in India. This accreditation process involves a continuous process of defining Program Outcomes (POs) and Course Outcomes (COs) and these are evaluated to check the OBE outcome level. This course evaluation includes course content, evaluation methods used for students' evaluation, pedagogy of teaching, Bloom's taxonomy mapping of learning levels, feedback from stakeholders and results and outcome analysis. If the required level is not attained, the COs and POs are reviewed and accordingly curriculum is revised. There are a lot of challenges being faced by faculty in this process of creating and assessing the curriculum as per NBA standards. These challenges are unique and non-trivial for PDC/HPC (Parallel and Distributed Computing/High-Performance Computing) courses. The preparation of OBE-based PDC/HPC course involves a lot of stakeholders and brainstorming over multiple sessions. Many universities are adopting PDC/HPC courses more recently across the world. With an intention to create a pointer for developing, delivering and reviewing a PDC/HPC course, this paper presents the course development process for the benefit of various stakeholders and specially PDC/HPC educators and institutions. This research paper presents the undergraduate teaching experience of parallel computing (PC) course with a critical evaluation based on course Outcomes (COs) and Bloom's taxonomy mapping of learning levels. This paper compiles a list of challenges faced by PDC/HPC educators and stakeholders focusing on the Indian education scenario. It lists the activities and the suggestions that can be applied to address these challenges suitably. The research and teaching experience-based discussions and strategies proposed in this paper help other PDC/HPC educators and stakeholders in the CS (Computer Science) community.