A team of highly dedicated researchers, leaders, and educators established IN4OBE in order to keep the flame of authentic Outcome Based Education burning throughout the world for a sixth decade. That visionary flame continues to empower every learner and leader within OBE’s reach to develop the skills and attributes that elevate humanity and its evolving future.
IN4OBE’s leadership team of flame-keepers has grown, diversified, and evolved over the decades, just as OBE’s defining philosophy, principles, and applications have done. What began in the 1968 as Benjamin Bloom’s mission to improve classroom instruction has come to expand and transform the very meaning of learning, leading, and educating. Today these enormous advances directly apply to business and government as well as to education. IN4OBE believes that humanity is at a tipping point that requires visionary thinking and action in all spheres of endeavor. Educational structures, practices, methods, materials, programs, and outcomes that served the priorities of earlier eras require fundamental rethinking and revision now because they can no longer meet the challenges and complexities facing humanity.
Preparing all learners to face those conditions successfully has been Transformational OBE’s mission and focus for nearly four decades, and IN4OBE is carrying out that mission today though its new visionary approach called Enlightened Empowerment (EE). EE applies OBE’s many decades of paradigm-shifting insights and learning models to further:
The work of the International Network for Outcome Based Education (IN4OBE) formally began in January, 1980 in the U.S. with the establishment of the Network for Outcome Based Schools and the publication of its quarterly newsletter, Outcomes. Over the next few years the Network grew from a few dozen founding members to over 2,000 educators and schools located in almost every U.S. state and Canadian province. Led by its Executive Director and newsletter Editor Dr. William Spady, the Network held a large number of state, regional, and national conferences highlighting the latest developments and innovations in Outcome Based implementation.
Dr. Spady established a technical support organization in 1991 called the High Success Network for Outcome Based Education (HSN).
High Success, as it became known, was famous for several major innovations in OBE design and practice.
Dr. Charles Schwahn and Dr. Spady, high level life-performance learning, school and curriculum restructuring, teacher teaming, action learning models, creative uses of instructional time.
Because of the widespread reach of HSN’s work, in 1997 Dr. Spady was invited by the national government of South Africa to assist in its nationwide Outcome Based curriculum implementation efforts. In addition, he provided support over the next decade to a number of local and national educational improvement projects; with Desmond Collier trained large cadres of principals and teachers in the fundamentals of OBE; assisted in an OBE design for the South Africa’s system of technical institutes; wrote extensively about ways OBE could be implemented in the country’s schools; and established a small model school in the city of Port Elizabeth.
Those efforts and his numerous OBE writings drew the attention of educators throughout the world, leading to invitations to bring the OBE concept to schools in Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, India, Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates, and, over a period of several years, to almost every state in Australia.
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IN4OBE’s work in higher education has enabled Dr. Spady and Dr. Wajid Hussain to assist several universities in Saudi Arabia to meet their Outcomes Accreditation requirements by developing, framing and measuring high level Outcomes for their students, along with aligned curricula, and engaging learning strategies. In addition, both have given invited seminars at Saudi Arabia’s National Assessment Center.
Currently IN4OBE’s largest national OBE initiative is in the Philippines, where Dr. Francis Uy has spearheaded a national movement in authentic OBE thinking and practice. With the participation of Dr. Spady, Dr. Hussain, and Dr. Trace Pickering, Dr. Uy’s initiatives have reached thousands of educators at all levels of the system.
In addition, Dr. Spady, Dr. Hussain, Dr. Joan Largo, and Dr. Uy have authored a book called Beyond Outcomes Accreditation that addresses the challenges posed by international accreditation requirements affecting colleges and universities across the world. In it they clearly demonstrate the major differences between Outcomes Accreditation and OBE, and provide universities with numerous suggestions for implementing more authentic and effective Outcome Based practices.
