UCF QUALITY ENHANCEMENT PLAN: INFORMATION FLUENCY
LINKS ABSTRACTThe University of Central Florida is the seventh largest institution in the U.S., with over 45,000 students and nine academic colleges. The university's ability to educate a skilled workforce to meet the needs of the local economy has been one of the key factors in the area's unprecedented prosperity in its core economic. The university is a critical economic engine for the area's growing high-technology industry and is at the center of Florida's High Technology Corridor.
The Quality Enhancement Plan, What if? A Foundation for Information Fluency, is a pilot effort to establish a foundation for information fluency at UCF. The QEP takes a multi-faceted approach to consider initiatives that will increase information fluency awareness and enrich the information fluency environment in order to enhance students' abilities to develop information fluency skills, as well as increase student and faculty engagement with information fluency. The university's QEP supports its mission as a metropolitan university and its goal to provide the best undergraduate education in Florida by addressing the issue of educating students to navigate competently through an abundance of information choices. In addition, the QEP Initiative is rooted in the strategic plan and builds upon the university's strengths in technology, distance learning, faculty development, and assessment.
In building a foundation for information fluency, the university is supporting pilot projects on three levels: environment, enhancement, and engagement. Environmental factors include all of the projects that increase the awareness of information fluency. In these projects, students will progressively acquire information fluency skills as they build upon the information and technology skills introduced in their lower division courses. Enhancement factors primarily facilitate the direct learning of information fluency skills. This area typically includes direct instruction methods and support systems. Finally, engagement factors broaden or intensify the delivery of information fluency capabilities among students and faculty members. This area includes curriculum and program design and innovations that focus on information fluency.
Assessments will focus both on the actual student or faculty learning and on the effectiveness of the initiative itself. The results of these assessments will be used to continuously improve the initiatives. A final report is the assessment of how well the QEP is progressing against a predetermined schedule.
The process of choosing and developing the QEP involved all appropriate constituencies across the UCF campuses including academic and library faculty, administrators, professional staff, and students. Funding will total more than $4 million over the life of the QEP initiative, with almost $3 million in new funds and over $1 million of in-kind funding.