The University now boasts a teleforum, a newly tested tool used to communicate with the student body.

The teleforum, a kind of call-in radio show tailored to students, is focused on specific events. The University tested the concept with its Get In The Game gameday information awareness program on Sept. 9.

Jeanine Brooks, director of the ACTion Card office, said the teleforum was considered a success and will be used by the University in the future.

“[Auxiliary Services] are looking at using it to reach out to parents of incoming freshmen for last-minute questions just prior to fall move-in,” Brooks said.

Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Molly Lawrence said the University is looking for other uses for the program. She listed graduation and freshmen fall registration as quality options.

“The group that we were working with really thought those were super ideas,” Lawrence said.

The volume and fluidity of the Sept. 9 teleforum made it a success, she said.

Lawrence said the Thursday night teleforum totaled 9,238 callers who stayed on the line more than two minutes.

A total of 862 students were on the line at one time, she said, and 29 calls made it to the panel, which was made up of representatives from the ACTion card office, the Athletics Department, the Office of Student Affairs and the Student Government Association.

“It kind of went like a talk show,” Lawrence said. “We had four screeners and the screeners either answered questions themselves or put people on the queue to go to the panel.

“We had a phone that had conferencing available so we could get it through the speaker and take turns answering the question,” she said.

“It went really smoothly,” Lawrence said. “I thought we had been there for 15 minutes and I looked up an it had been an hour.”

Both Brooks and Lawrence said the biggest technical issue of the teleforum was reaching students. Many students did not have their cell phone numbers or local landlines listed on their MyBama accounts, so when the University called the student body on Sept. 8 to deliver information regarding the teleforum, many home phones and parents were reached.

“It was just surprising that we had as many parents calling in as we did,” Lawrence said. “But we understood it because we called so many homes.

“[Parents] had heard from someone that [students] couldn’t get into the lower bowl (of Bryant-Denny Stadium) because it was full, and they wanted to know how they could prevent that from happening again,” she said. “Some parents were just wanting to know how they could get into the games themselves.”

Brooks said the product itself, offered by Broadnet, was easy to use.

“It’s a very user-friendly product,” she said.

“All of us that participated in it really thought it was a success,” Lawrence added.