Today's global economy is increasingly more complex, technological, flexible, entrepreneurial and competitive. Many firms are turning to distinctive manufacturing, in which designers, engineers, and production workers collaborate in seamless teams to ensure that products and services meet consumer requirements, that new technologies are applied quickly, and that operations run at optimum efficiency to maximize return on investment. The catalyst is a new type of high-performance technician who employs buffering and brokering skills. A team of advanced technological firms, educational institutions, national resource organizations and minority alliances is re-engineering the failing traditional approach to preparing high-performance technicians for distinctive manufacturing by changing the paradigm from "providing instruction" to "producing learning." The project also pioneers a comprehensive strategy to recruit and retain underrepresented populations and others who typically overlook advanced technological career opportunities. This innovative program: * infuses the content of a 90-semester-credit-hour equivalent, AAS degree into metadisciplinary projects set in a real-world manufacturing environment which employs facilitators rather than intructors in a personalized, holistic program of learning; * demands mastery of rigorous competencies in workplace effectiveness and personal productivity as well as in communications, mathematics, science and technology; * ensures faculty, tutors and employer-based resource persons are competent in new roles of planning, facilitating, coaching, assessing and documenting learning; * recruits and capacitates members of underrepresented groups; and * communicates the project's deliverables and lessons learned.
