Innovating Education: Tarrant County College's Powerful Learning Experience Without Added Costs

The Program

Tarrant County College (TCC) has been educating and training Radiography Technologists at its campus in Fort Worth, Texas, since 1970. TCC’s two-year Radiologic Technology AAS program regularly enrolls 30 students each year and has a five-year average job placement rate of 96%. The average tuition per student is $4,400 for Texas residents.

“I have always been cost-conscious regarding our students' program-related expenses. When we decided to incorporate Clover’s resources, I decided to reduce the students' program costs by removing some required textbooks.” - Brian Spence, MSRS, RT(R), Radiologic Technology Program Director, Tarrant County College

The Challenge

Provide adult students with efficient, affordable learning tools.

According to Brian Spence, TCC’s Radiologic Technology Program Director since 2015, “80-85% of our students are working, have families or other commitments.” A typical student in the program is a woman in her mid-thirties who may already hold an AAS or BS in a healthcare-related field but is seeking to improve her career growth potential through a new degree. Given the balancing act their students face, Spence and other program instructors seek to make learning their course material as efficient and cost-effective as possible for their students.

The Solution

Replace textbooks with a much better learning experience without increasing costs.

In 2019, Spence discovered the Clover Learning platform with its suite of Radiography video lessons and bank of registry-style exam questions. He saw the potential for this on-demand resource to help his students revisit lecture topics and build understanding on their own schedule. But he worried introducing yet another resource would be cost-prohibitive for his students.

Spence quickly realized that with Clover Learning’s extensive library of video lessons, he could eliminate two textbooks on advanced imaging and pathology from his syllabus. This also gave him the freedom to switch to a new textbook he preferred that supported multiple courses. “For Principles of Imaging I, Principles of Imaging II, and Equipment Operation, I used to require 2 books. When we incorporated Clover, I switched to 1 book, which includes all content for the 3 courses.”

Together, these changes allowed Spence and his colleagues to make Clover Learning a required resource without increasing the students' budgets. As Spence acknowledges, “Maybe there wasn’t necessarily a cost savings, but we are replacing what they were doing with what we feel like is so much of a better learning experience.”

The Result

The Clover Learning platform has been a required resource for students in the Radiologic Technology program for five years, and both instructors and students are seeing the benefits.

Short, engaging, on-demand video lessons let students review on their own schedule.

Spence and his colleagues regularly assign their students to watch video lessons on Clover Learning and complete the post-lesson quiz as part of their assignment grade. Students are leveraging the note-taking feature to keep track of their learning and re-watching the byte-size videos on focused topics to help prepare for their exams.

After an exam, Spence asks his students what they could do to improve their preparation next time, and more and more students are citing that they need to “Remember to go back and rewatch Clover videos!” In his pre-graduation survey, Spence asks his students about their experience in the program and what has helped them learn, and students overwhelmingly report that Clover Learning was very helpful to their learning, and they “love that the videos are short, animated, and very helpful.”

Jessica Silverman

Chief Learning Officer