The Proposal

This is the proposal that we wrote to show John O'Leary during our meeting on Friday the 12th December.

We have researched into what students already know about the Additional Support services offered by the college, and have done interviews with several main people who offer support - Steve Newman, Karen Mayfield, Oz Ozbourne, and Vivienne Ridpath. This has helped us to understand the service. We still have to interview some other people like Janet Waters, Bob Smith and Vera Baney.

We also surveyed about 50 students by asking them questions about the Additional Support Service. We have found out a number of interesting facts about levels of awareness of the service amongst students:

We found that over a third of students were not aware of any additional support services in the college. (60.4 % of students were aware of the student support services at the college and 39.6 were not).

More students (40%), had not seen any advertising about the services.

Out of those who had seen advertising, the majority of the students said that they had noticed posters.

We also asked what students thought would be the best way to be told about the additional support services. The majority said posters, but other ideas were the daily bulletin, on screens around the college, college intranet, emails and induction.

We also asked if they thought there were students that wanted to use the services but were too embarrassed most of the students said yes (79 %). However, the number of students that said they would seek support was more than the people that said they wouldn’t. (64%)

We asked students if they knew who to go see for different issues, and most of them didn’t know who to see.

Also most students didn’t know how to make an appointment to see any of the members of additional support.

After doing this research we started to work out our ideas for the video we want to produce. Our idea is to produce one version for the tutor programme and the internet, and another version, without sound, for the screens around college.

We’d now like to present our proposal for you, and ask for your opinion of it, and any suggestions you have about how we could improve it.

SHOW STORYBOARDS
Title screen appears with the question “Do you know?” “That your College offers” “additional support for many different things?”

Then a group of friends are shown in the common room round a table all discussing their personal problems. Camera focuses on one person to begin with, this person then tells us their problem. Let’s say they are worried about money. The camera then fast tracks to the room of the Student Support Officer, perhaps with a dissolve to a map of the college where we see a red line travelling from the common room to the office. She then explains who she is and what areas she can help with. The camera then dissolves back to the table in the common room and the person who was before feeling down tells us how the service helped him or her “Yeah, I was really in trouble but she helped me sort out my EMA and my Access application and she even came with me to the Housing Department. She was brilliant!”

The camera then focuses on another student who says something like “I wish my problem could be sorted like yours….” Then the same thing happens. We follow the same structure until we get through each person and their
individual problems. Not only does this show the effectiveness of the service but it also explains what the service offers and shows it’s not an embarrassing thing to do because the group of friends discuss the service so openly.

We have a variation of this idea. Instead of a group discussing their problems, we start with a pan around a busy room, like the common room, or the library, and the camera picks out one person, sitting alone, and we hear their thoughts in a voiceover. The rest would be the same, but this way, each person with a problem starts off alone, but then ends up in a group, explaining how college would help them. We would also be able to show the route to the right office from different starting points.