Transformational Learning Opportunities
Currently, the University of North Florida enrolls over 13,000 undergraduates. While the university will continue to grow, it will do so strategically in order to maintain the high quality undergraduate experience that awaits students at an institution large enough to offer a broad range of rich academic programs and small enough to allow for exceptional attention to the interests and ambitions of individual students. To assure that every student will receive such attention, President Delaney has launched an initiative to provide UNF students with what are referred to across the university as “transformational learning opportunities.”
The common denominator among “TLOs,” whether they occur inside or outside the classroom, is the potential for the opportunities to become truly transforming, significantly impacting the student’s professional and personal development. TLOs set the occasion for life changing experiences. These transformational learning opportunities may take a myriad of forms: they may be semester-long internships or practicums, or they could be service learning or civic engagement projects. They may be study abroad experiences or faculty supervised research activities. They might even include participation in a learning community where students and faculty embrace active learning strategies.
As rich as the classroom experience at UNF might be, responses from first-year students to questions on the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) indicate that freshmen are interested in those enriching experiences often found outside of the classroom that support learning but are offshoots from or even not directly part of the curriculum. For example, 34% of first-year students either plan to or have already worked with faculty on research projects. Another 43% of freshmen responded that they plan to enroll in a study abroad program. What sets UNF apart from other state-supported, comprehensive universities within the southeast is its commitment to provide repeated opportunities for every student not only to develop knowledge and skills within their chosen fields of study but to enrich those competencies with potentially transforming engagement opportunities.