It’s no secret that international and experiential learning opportunities often translate into long-term career skills, thoughtful perspectives and overall value for students post-graduation. However, when global engagement is established as a guiding force coming from top leadership, institutions have the potential to deliver transformative global educational impacts at scale to more students than ever before. This is exactly how Elon University approaches internationalization and experiential education for its population of 7,000 students.

In the past, Elon’s 10-year strategic plan has included global engagement as a major theme—with a strong focus on ensuring more students were able to travel abroad or come to study at Elon from other countries. However, Elon’s latest strategic plan (2020-2030)—led by the university’s President—has evolved to focus on further enriching the overall international experience.

"As the University transitions from the 2020 to the 2030 plan, the focus shifts from access-centered and numbers-driven objectives to better understanding the lasting impact of global education. While Elon carries forward its commitment to making global engagement accessible to all students, we are also working to deepen the transformational learning happening on global programs,” said Nick Gozik, Dean of Global Education at Elon University. 

A longtime client, Elon uses Terra Dotta to centrally manage study abroad enrollment and manage traveler communication and duty of care and to foster active student engagement. To help communicate its comprehensive global engagement vision, Elon created a Global Education “GBL” course prefix to centralize and standardize global curriculum across campus. Elon also adjusted its site-wide navigation header with a link to a “Global” directory page to showcase  the global work happening throughout Elon. Likewise, Elon has created a “Global @ Elon” digest and calendar of global events to collectively tell the story of global education at Elon in the many shapes it takes, from curricular to experiential, and from top-down to bottom-up.