Recently in the Athabasca Advocate, the Graduate Students’ Union President, Amanda Nielsen, said that “students view the call centre as a positive step to restructure the university”. Already used in the business school, the call centre would eliminate any direct means of contact students have with tutors.
Calls that require academic experts would have to be referred to them, and these experts would then contact you within a 48 hour window thereafter to answer the question that stopped your studies. According to Ms. Nielsen, restructuring the university in this way is a positive step because it would allow the university to save money, as questions about “university policies, like getting transcripts, you don’t need to pay a faculty member with a higher salary to answer it when you have a call centre handling it.” However, AU currently maintains an information centre to handle such questions from 8:00am to 5:00pm Monday to Friday and there are no indications that it is staffed by faculty.
There are currently no plans to move graduate studies to a call centre model.
