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| The Following Development |
 Because to the implementation of call center model, payments to telephone tutors were one of the School of Business's largest expenses. Every single academic advisor now handles calls from about three times as many students per week as an average telephone tutor previously did. Therefore, student support costs have been reduced by approximately $100,000 annually in School of Business undergraduate independent study courses. It enabled the development of the call back conference. Moreover, an online course development and delivery system incorporating the call center was developed for most School of Business undergraduate courses. Lotus Notes® technology was used, a groupware software suite. Course materials are continually being developed and improved, so that students can access course help through their course Web sites, as well as interact with call center staff and academics via the Web, using chat or discussion boards.
The database of call back conference allows undergraduate student advisors and academics to track and resolve student queries online, a necessity once student support was spread among academic and support staff. The call back conference tracking only accounted for approximately 20% of student contacts that could not directly be answered by the undergraduate student advisors (Adria & Woudstra, 2001). But beginning in the 2002-2003 academic year, a comprehensive Notes-based student tracking system has tracked all queries to the call center, including those handled by the call back conference, whether by e-mail or telephone. Such system is Web-enabled and allows academics and other University staff to access the database from virtually anywhere, using a standard Web browser. It is also able to produce reports and statistics on student contacts, for use, among other things, in improving courseware.
Each year, a group of students is surveyed about their satisfaction with the services they receive from the academic departments (see Athabasca University, 2002). Such surveys point to areas in which the Call Center can be improved, or areas where it should continue doing those good things that are working well. They show that the differences between direct tutor-to-student interaction and call-center-to-student interaction are very small, and the accessibility of the call center is an accepted and valued service to students. It informs decisions about how services will be distributed to students. All problems are quickly solved in the call center environment, whereas long delays often occurred in the previous student-to-tutor model.
What requires improvement in the School of Business call center model is the involvement of the full time academics as a group in the delivery of instruction and service to students. Since the opportunity exists for their involvement, many have chosen to concentrate on their research activities, and to “buy out” their academic tutoring responsibility. A contact with the course academic is asked by students, and then find their contact is delayed or does not occur as they had supposed. It is noted that the inclusion of student contact requirements in negotiated annual workloads would easily solve this problem.
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