Assessing the Costs and Benefits of Telelearning: A Case Study ...

and they called **** and sent her e-mail and she responded. I don’t know
how many [students]. (instructor 1)
I guess maybe, maybe I am just a little bit old school in the sense that I
don’t have entire faith in the electronic library system, because I think that
they are very dependent on someone else’s categorization. So I still like
some of the tried and true back-up methods and unless you have a really
good research library it is kind of hard to do that kind of leg-work. Those
are just my worries and they may be unfounded. (student A)
Telephone Services. One student suggested that help over the phone in the form
of Teaching Assistants would have been helpful:
There should be T.A.s available over the phone to help when needed with
technical problems - i.e. a pager system or something similar. (student 9)
Phone help would have been useful for learning to upload files. (student
9)
Another student mentioned that OISE/UT had, in the past, provided a toll free number for
their distance students but that it was no longer in operation:
As a remote student, at one time a toll free number was provided by OISE.
For the past couple of months, it has been out of operation without
explanation. This makes it very difficult for me to contact OISE. (In my
residential area, we use a private phone company and long distance
charges are not affordable at peak hours). E-mail messages sent,
especially to the registrars office are very slow to respond or no response
at all is received. (student 3)
However, online help was available from the instructors and help desk. In addition, a
help line was available. The instructors also responded to student queries by phone. In
the example described below though, this proved to be time consuming and expensive:
On long distance calls we did have problems with one student from Egypt.
And she had a lot of problems trying to cope with this. I think it’s because
it was one of the first courses that she had ever taken but it was the wrong
course for her to be taking. She insisted that she wanted to do something
via computer conferencing. And it was wrong. She shouldn’t have been
doing that course at this point in her program and she was a techno
whatever, a techno-nerd, but also trying to do it from Egypt. On her I
would have spent a minimum of I would think a day and half or two days
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