Proposal

Date:   November 3, 2024.
To:    Elizabeth Parrish, M.A.
     Director of the Writing Center.
From:  Ramon Medina Student at Tarrant County College.
     Uriel Martinez, Student at Tarrant County College.
     Benjamin Zimmerman, Student at Tarrant County College.
     Noah Sanchez, Student at Tarrant County College.
Subject: Proposal for Making Resources More Accessible at TCC Northeast Campus

Presentation available here

Purpose

Our purpose is to do research as to how to make resources at the TCC Northeast campus more accessible to students for their academic work.

Summary

On October 15, 2024, Dr. Stuewe requested that we conduct a proposal for an issue we want to resolve. The current way to access the student resources is not convenient for students at Tarrant County College. The current way to access the student resources takes too many clicks. By having too many clicks to access, students lose interest and do not use the sources properly.

Surely, this is an issue for Tarrant County College students; especially for those students who have attention deficits. Students will completely ignore the students resources or they just would not even know about its existence.

Therefore, our group wanted to determine the need for easier and faster access to the student resource page for Tarrant County College students at Northeast Campus. We propose to research the need for a user-friendly TCC student access to the student source, as well its benefits. To perform these tasks, we would perform primary and secondary research.

Specifically, we developed a plan to perform four tasks: Our first task is to research information about how student resources can be accessed easily that would benefit the students academic development. The second task is to send out an online survey to TCC students to determine how they would like the idea and what benefit they think is helpful for them. The third task is to conduct an interview with the writing center director to understand their cost and benefits of this idea. After we have gathered our information, we would analyze the collected data and prepare a recommendation report.

Finally, if this proposal is authorized, we will begin our research immediately, submitting our proposal to Dr. Stuewe October 15, 2024. Then, we would conduct our recommendation report, submitting our report to Dr. Stuewe on November 3, 2024. Our recommendation report would include all the data of our research and recommendations regarding having easier and faster access to the student resources for TCC students at the Northeast location.

Introduction

October 15, 2024, our class was tasked with creating a proposal to resolve an issue or make an improvement for TCC Northeast campus.
The current issue that a lot of students face is the lack of accessibility to resources that are provided to the students at the Northeast campus. An example of this can be the Writing Center at the Northeast campus. The online portion of the North East Writing Center allows students to submit their work to the center for advisors to peer review the work. Here is how the process works:

  1. Go to the TCC website and search up: learning commons
  2. Click on the virtual learning commons on canvas
  3. Then you select which campus you are accessing
  4. After click on the Writing Center
  5. Click on TracCloud to upload your documents

Accessing to the writing center, however, is very complicated as it takes students to go out further to access the writing center than it should have to be. Rather than having to go through all of those clicks and links that students have to follow, it should be a whole canvas tile for the students. Having a canvas tile for the learning commons will be a lot easier to access and make students' time more flexible. This does not only apply to the writing center, but other centers that the Northeast campus has.

In order to resolve the issues, we have employed the following tasks:

  1. Conducting research to see how accessible resources for students to access is beneficial.
  2. Get with one of the learning center employees such as the writing center and interview them. Interviewing them about the idea of having a more accessible way of accessing learning commons
  3. Creating a survey to get an idea of how resources at the Northeast campus could be better.
  4. Analyze and interpret the data that we gathered throughout the proposal.

Proposed Tasks

With approval from Dr. Stuewe, we will conduct 4 tasks that will determine if we can make student resources more accessible.

Task 1: Research for the benefits of accessing resources for education.

We conducted the research and found a lot of articles supporting the benefits of students accessing resources. From our findings, we found that students who have easier access to their resources boost their interest in the topic of research (Newpath Learning). Giving them this boost also encourages the students to read the articles that are easy to access (New England BOE). The studies clearly show evidence that having easier access to resources keeps students engaged which is what colleges want.

We also researched articles that covered university budgeting for allowing to have resources provided for the students. From our findings, we found that universities place roughly $20 million dollars on facilities that provide resources to students (TopUniversities). This does include the writing center, and the online portion of the student resources.

We concluded that the school provides a lot of funding for accessible resources, and that having easier access to resources is beneficial.

Task 2: Interview with the director of the TCC Northeast Writing Center.

For the interview, these will be the questions that are going to be asked: How do you feel about the quality of access to the writing center? Would making a canvas tile for the writing center be an option that the center is willing to do? Will creating a canvas tile dedicated for the writing center be beneficial for TCC and TCC students?

Task 3: Creating a survey and sending it out

We conducted a survey to ask TCC students at the Northeast campus the following: How easy is it to access student resources such as the writing center and etc… Would you prefer a better way for it to be organized? Would having a canvas tile for student resources on canvas be a consideration?

​​Task 4: Analyzing our survey and drawing conclusions

We will meet together to discuss our findings with each other. Then we will write our findings down on a separate Google doc and summarize the responses. That way we can find a correlation to the answers given to us from the TCC students on the Northeast campus.

Schedule

The Gantt chart below shows our task schedule:

Gantt chart showing the schedule

Experience

As TCC students, we understand that the Northeast campus provides the resources that it gives to students. However, we are aware that finding those resources online can be quite tedious and not easy to access like submitting your work to the writing center. Frankly, if the accessibility of the resources are not there, students will not bother to find those resources or lose interest in finding them.

Works Cited

 - “5 Ways Open Educational Resources Can Help Students Succeed This Fall.”, New England Board of Higher Education. New England Board of Higher Education, 21 Sept. 2020, nebhe.org/journal/5-ways-open-educational-resources-can-help-students-succeed-this-fal.
 - NewPath Learning. “What Makes Supplemental Educational Resources Valuable to Students?” What Makes Supplemental Educational Resources Valuable to Students?, 11 Nov. 2021, www.newpathlearning.com/the-latest-news/what-makes-supplemental-educational-resources-valuable-to-students.
 - Parrish, Elizabeth. Personal Interview. 23 Oct. 2024
 - TopUniversities. “University Budgets: Where Your Fees Go.”, University Budgets: Where Your Fees Go., 5 Aug. 2024, www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/university-budgets-where-your-fees-go.
 - Zimmerman, Ben, et al. Students View of Resource Accessibility. 21 Oct. 2024

Presentation available here