Research Plan

The mission of #help! is to help students be successful by providing an easy way to collaborate and exchange materials and information. Creating this website will support our mission by including an online textbook exchange that provides a convenient and cost-effective way to obtain materials. It will also support our mission by including discussion tools and a platform to interact with other students. We want the audience to feel connected to the OSU community and to be able to easily ask questions and exchange textbooks.

The target audience will be Ohio State Columbus campus students, especially those in large lectures which inhibit students from having one-on-one time with the professor. Also, all students can benefit from the textbook exchange.

The top 3 goals of our business/idea include:

1. Provide a secure platform where students can exchange textbooks and materials.
2. Provide a space where students from the same course can interact, collaborate, and form study groups.
3.  Provide a place where students can find help by looking for available tutors and students can list themselves as tutors for certain classes.

We will use HTML, CSS, and Dreamweaver to design an intuitive layout that makes the site comfortable to use. Ideally, the programming behind the site would make it run smoothly and efficiently; we could use some sort of outside widget for the message boards.

We will keep the site updated to include the current classes at OSU by importing the class lists from Buckeyelink.