Accessing Yavapai College’s online coursework and educational resources just got easier for Camp Verde residents. On May 9, the Yavapai Collge District Governing Board unanimously approved an intergovernmental agreement between the college and the Town of Camp Verde to provide laptops to Yavapai College students at the Camp Verde Community Library.
According to a press release from the college, the agreement from an “initiative to enhance college access for areas of the district where Yavapai College does not have existing facilities.”
“They set up three laptops,” CVCL Director Kathy Hellman said, adding that any Yavapai College student is allowed to check out the computers.
“The really neat thing for students is there’s no time limit. They can be on it as long as they need to be.
“I was most excited about the access to resources students at campus would have …. On our own, we don’t have access to some of the expensive applications they might need [but with the laptops] they can access all of the same apps, such as the Adobe Creative suite, that students in Prescott or the Verde Campus can.”
Along with the application access — which allows completion of some coursework that could otherwise not be completed from a remote location — each student is allotted 15 GB of data.
According to Hellman, the agreement came from the college’s own research into which municipalities in the Verde Valley had the greatest need for remote access.
“Yavapai College has been trying to find ways to reach out to the outlying counties in the county more,” Hellman said. “They reached out to us to see if we wanted to partner with them. Before they approached us, they checked our IP addresses and checked how often their students were accessing coursework.”
CVCL had one of highest rates of usage, Hellman said, “which means we already have students here.”
The college and Hellman discussed various options for student access to coursework, eventually landing on the idea of providing laptops for their use. The possibility of providing other services to the student community in Camp Verde, however, remains open.
“We hope to provide some support where students could actually make an appointment with someone from the college to access college resources,” Hellman said. “We would like to support students attending Yavapai College [and] I think it has some good potential to provide access.”
Yavapai College Verde Valley Campus Executive Dean James Perey praised the agreement, saying that in its simplest terms the college’s mission is to allow diverse populations a variety of educational opportunities.
“Our service area is over 8,000 square miles and provides some unique challenges to delivery and access, especially in rural areas,” Perey said. “Working with the Town of Camp Verde is one more step in meeting the challenge of providing access to a high quality education.”
