Abstract
The view of a capstone course or experience depends on how the education process as whole is viewed. When an educational program is designed, the learning outcomes can be viewed as the desired attributes or abilities of the learner at the end of the program. The program itself becomes the process through which these attributes are achieved. Each designed course in the program is a sub-process with its learning outcomes incrementally contributing to the final program learning outcomes. Each course or sub-process is designed for the learner development towards the final goal state and validated based on the course set criteria or outcomes. Capstone courses are usually the last phase for development and validation of the program itself. For this reason capstone courses, concerning the validation aspect, should share the final validation criteria with the program. As for the development aspect all the efforts during the course should be driven to close the gap between the learner state entering the course and goal state at the end of the course as well as the program. In this paper, the implementation and assessment of this view of a capstone course is studied. In this study, the course learning objectives are aligned with the Program Educational Objectives and a set of Performance Indicator is developed. To measure the gaps for each team of students, in the capstone course, assessment for each Performance Indicator is conducted at the beginning of the course. These assessments are based on established performance targets and are used as indicators of the gaps to be closed for each team. These gaps are used to guide and monitor the activities of each team until the end of the course. At the end of the course, using the same targets, assessment of each team performance is again conducted to measure the extent of the gap closure, as well as course and program assessment. To demonstrate the implementation process, some assessment data and results are discussed.