Rubrics Based Continuous Assessment for Effective Learning of Digital Electronics Laboratory Course

Today's world lays more emphasis on embedded product design which necessitates the inclusion of hardware courses like Digital Electronics, Computer Organization and Microcontrollers in the curriculum for undergraduate program in Computer Science. These pre-requisite courses introduced in the lower semesters pave the way for students to develop keen interest, skill and proficiency in the area of Embedded system design. But students of Computer Science generally lack interest in hardware related courses, a fact which has been observed time and again by teachers handling these courses. Therefore the challenges that lay before the course instructors was to make the students take interest in these courses and also to make them industry ready so as to compete with peers from other engineering branches in the domain of Embedded Systems. This paper discusses the experience of the authors in teaching the course on Digital Electronics laboratory. In order to handle the challenges mentioned above, after much debate and discussion, amongst all stake holders, it was decided to apply structured enquiry based learning strategy. Structured enquiry is a form of pedagogical practice that facilitates students' to build on previous learning and provide a strong foundation for further learning in relation to the objectives defined. This approach was also found to enhance the quality of teaching as a result of which students' ability to conduct investigations of technical issues consistent with their level of knowledge and understanding improved. Here we present a set of activities, their related outcome based assessment techniques and outcome based strategies applied to the laboratory course on Digital Electronics in Computer Engineering at the III Semester level. The course was designed to consist of initially, conducting simple exercises to provide hands on experience and use of appropriate modern engineering tools to simulate the designed circuit for the given problem statement after which it was prototyped. Along with the regular lab experiments, student' teams were made to work on course projects which required them to design and build projects. This promoted their self-learning, improved their knowledge of digital circuit design well beyond that directly taught in lectures, improved students' creative thinking, applied logic ability and practical thinking. This paper discusses the attempts made by the course teachers to achieve these goals. The first step was to set appropriate course outcomes (COs). The subsequent step was to align the COs to suitable Program Outcomes (POs) through relevant competencies (CAs) and performance indicators (PIs). Later rubrics were written to assess the attainment of each of the Program Outcomes. This activity resulted in enhanced motivational levels amongst students, increased their involvement in the team and improved their knowledge due to self learning.