Pressures on Green Supply Chain Management: A Study on Manufacturing Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in China

This study aims to empirically investigate the pressures for adopting green supply chain management (GSCM) among Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Data is collected through the use of mail distributed questionnaires administered to participants at a national trade fair held in Suzhou and two rounds of data collection were carried out to make a more reliable result for the research. ANOVA and Factor analysis are used to analyze the data. Some key findings are found from this study. Firstly, there is indifference among the four industrial sectors in terms of facing pressures in adopting GSCM practices. Secondly, all of the pressures from environmental laws and regulations, the pressures in the process of selling the products and the pressures in the supply chain in the relation with the suppliers and customers have impacted on the decisions of SMEs to employ GSCM practices. The main limitation to this paper is the relatively small manufacturing sample of SMEs. The paper explores the GSCM pressures faced by Chinese SMEs which may be different from the findings through the studies on large enterprises in China. Key words: Supply chain management; Pressures on green supply chain management small and medium-sized enterprises; Chinese manufacturing industr

Outcome-Based Engineering Education: A Global Report of International OBE Accreditation and Assessment Practices

Outcome-based education (OBE) is a paradigm in which instructional and assessment/ evaluation are explicitly designed for ensuring the attainment and mastery of predefined learning outcomes. OBE is now the underlying paradigm followed by global accreditation efforts such as the Washington Accord (ratified in 1989). The shift to OBE is so pronounced that some education experts identify the shift to outcome-based education and accreditation as one of the top 5 major changes of the last 100 years. OBE is starkly different from the previous content-based educational approaches in shifting the aim from covering the content to a student-centric mastery that is driven by exit-outcomes and educational objectives. And while OBE is often criticized for straitjacketing education, and resisted by hesitant faculty members suspecting additional burden, studies show that the OBE movement, on the whole, has helped in improving the educational standards and outcomes by helping ensure proper planning of curriculum and assessment and their alignment with the program objectives and desired outcomes. OBE is also flexible in the sense that it does not dictate the choice of specific education strategies or teaching methods. New OBE schemes have also diversified in response to early misgiving about OBE (related to excessive paperwork, and bean-counting-like auditing) and now admit diverse types of evidence (including qualitative and quantitative, formative and summative, formal and informal assessments). In this paper, we present—as a geographically dispersed set of academics from Pakistan, United Kingdom, United States of America, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia—a global international perspective on OBE accreditation standards, practices, and attitudes. We will trace the historical development leading to the great shift to OBE in recent times and also synthesize insights from our diverse transnational experience in meeting accreditation requirements in different countries