Final Report Pilot Project - Phase 1

academic authority. The objectives are completely different: Tuninglooks for common reference points.Tuning has been designed as an independent university drivenproject, which is co-ordinated by university staff members fromdifferent countries. The participating higher education institutionscover all EU en EFTA countries. The European Commission and theinstitutions involved financed the project. For phase one of the project(2000-2002) an Inner Circle and an Outer Circle of institutions wereestablished. The Inner Circle consisted of five so-called subject areagroups, Business Administration, Education Sciences, Geology, Historyand Mathematics, which included a total of 76 higher educationalinstitutions. Two thematic networks, Physics and Chemistry, workedclosely together with the project as the groups six and seven, makingup a total of around 100 institutions.Besides the seven subject area groups, the so-called Synergy groupswere represented in the project’s Steering Committee. They are:Languages, Humanitarian Development, Law, Medicine, MechanicalEngineering and Veterinary Sciences. Other members of the SteeringCommittee were the two general project-co-ordinators, the subject areaco-ordinators and higher education experts, representatives of theEuropean University Association, of Lifelong learning, of the NationalAgencies and three representatives of the accession countries. Theproject has been co-ordinated on a daily basis by the general project coordinatorsand their project-assistants in close co-operation with theother members of the Management Committee: the Higher Educationexperts and subject area co-ordinators. One expert and one subject areaco-ordinator were responsible for each of the seven subject-area groups.The Outer Circle of Tuning consisted of institutions that wereinterested in the project, but could not be active participants as membersof the Inner Circle. Tuning kept this group informed about all importantdevelopments in the project.Tuning methodologyIn the framework of the Tuning project a methodology has beendesigned to understand curricula and to make them comparable. Aspart of the methodology the concept of learning outcomes andcompetences was introduced. For each of the mentioned subject areasthese have been described in terms of reference points to be met.According to Tuning these are the most relevant elements in thedesign, construction and assessment of qualifications.23