The waning days of the summer season are upon us and that means the start of school. Welcome!
In addition to our usual plethora of services and resources, the Libraries and Academic Support team have been working hard on some new initiatives designed for your success. I would like to share them with you.
Finding reliable, accurate and truthful information is important to us all — and is becoming more difficult to find with biased sources, personally-created content and even artificial intelligence. Our teaching librarians have created a new approach, aptly named PROWL: Pause, Retrace, Observe, the Five W’s and Look, to help.
This new method of conducting research and finding information for your assignments, projects and papers is a fool-proof way to ace your class. Not only is this an important skill for school, but it is a critical life skill you will use forever. Our librarians are masters at research and the go-to people for the best support.
And speaking of research, the library will be offering their first Research Award to a student who exemplifies sound research skills. Students can submit papers through December finals. Entries will be judged by a panel of library staff with the winner being announced in January.
Judging will be done with a standard rubric grading of the reflective paragraph, the body of the research project and the sources used. The award can go towards tuition or as needed by the winner. All the more reason to work with a librarian and hone those skills.
Our Student Achievement Center is proud to announce our new classroom embedded tutoring program. It will provide qualified, well-trained tutors directly into classrooms as requested by faculty. Studies show that having a tutor inside of the classroom can help a student succeed. Of course, this service is in addition to tutors we have available for walk-in and online service to help with math, science and more at our six campus locations.
The Center is also launching a new service for our regional students titled RegionsConnect Tutor Lab. This program offers regional students exclusive and expanded access to our professional tutors also known as the Academic Engagement Partners.
These tutors can cover all the heavy-duty courses like Intermediate Algebra, Anatomy & Physiology, Chemistry and many more. They will be available online twice a week for six hours for immediate support. Contact your regional Achievement Center or Library for more information.
Last year our Library and Achievement Center staff had almost 1.5 million engagements with our students ranging from technology needs (the library is the main student computer help desk) to research to study skills to tutoring.
In the Student Satisfaction Survey conducted last fall, students ranked our resources, services, and staff among the highest in satisfaction. We hope you will stop in and/or call to see for yourselves. Best of luck to all of you.