Will Texas take to tuning?

From the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board's newsletter:

Tuning Oversight 2011 Council for Engineering and Science will apply the “Tuning” and course-level alignment processes to additional engineering and science disciplines

On February 25, with grant support from Lumina Foundation for Education, the Coordinating Board (CB) will host the first meeting of the 2011 Tuning Oversight Council for Engineering and Science, the voluntary faculty advisory council that will assist the CB in continuing to integrate the “Tuning” process (as described below) into the course-level alignment work that was piloted in 2009 through the efforts of the Voluntary Mechanical Engineering Transfer Compact Committee, and which continued in 2010 with the efforts of the 2010 Tuning Oversight Council for Engineering. The 2011 Tuning Oversight Council will consist of four voluntary faculty advisory committees: (1) Biomedical Engineering, (2) Chemical Engineering, (3) Biology, and (4) Chemistry.

Nominations for faculty members to serve on the 2011 Tuning Oversight Council for Engineering and Science have been requested from universities and community colleges across the state; to date, invitations for specific nominees to participate on the council have been sent to 36 faculty members representing 31 institutions. The final makeup of the council and respective committees will be determined by February 18.

The 2010 Tuning Oversight Council for Engineering, which is made up of higher education faculty representing 30 higher education institutions from across the state, is expected to complete Tuning and lower-division course-level alignment work for the disciplines of Civil, Electrical, Industrial, and Mechanical Engineering in May. Additional information is available below and online at: www.thecb.state.tx.us/tuningtexas.

“Tuning” is a faculty-led pilot project designed to provide an indication of the knowledge, skills, and abilities students should achieve prior to graduation at different degree levels.

Tuning involves:

• Faculty from different sectors and institutions agreeing on what students in a field must know, understand, and be able to do;
  
• Surveying faculty to prioritize subject-area competencies;
  
• Soliciting views of students, graduates, and employers on the most valued general competencies in the field;
  
• Faculty defining degrees using active learning outcomes that can be assessed through coursework and other means; and
  
• Mapping the employability of degree holders.

“Fine-Tuning” or alignment of lower division courses involves:

• Identifying common and atypical lower-division courses in a discipline where learning outcomes align with the Tuned discipline;
  
• Reviewing syllabi for all lower-division courses; and
  
• Selecting the most comprehensive course description, pre-/co-requisites, and learning outcomes for each lower-division course.