Mentoring in Lower-Level Engineering Courses

Online mentoring using innovative new technologies for teaching and learning is increasingly attractive to help students at long distance or with intricate schedules. The need for online mentoring at many higher education institutions is becoming greater every day due to challenges students go through related to traveling to school or schedules that conflict with the traditional face-to-face mentoring and office hours. Online peer mentoring with trained mentors could be a convenient option to help students at different campuses or at different universities and/or community colleges. In this paper, procedures and steps required for peer mentors for face-to-face and online mentoring scenarios are presented based on an initial pilot study. Online peer mentoring was implemented in a low-level engineering course (e.g. engineering mechanics). In addition, in this study online mentoring is explored through a study to determine best practices, local student perceptions and preferences, and to identify required additional implementation steps. For example, student opinions were collected to recognize student preferences among face-to-face or online mentoring at our multi-campus minority serving institution. With the new generation of minority engineering students taking classes in different campuses, it was expected that there would be an increasing preference for online mentoring. However, current student opinions have indicated that they prefer face-to-face mentoring, but also suggesting that in some circumstances, online mentoring is convenient and cost effective. Either way, mentees expect the mentors to be supportive, well-knowledgeable, skilled, and preferably with previous mentoring experience in person, online, or both. Furthermore, to prepare good mentoring sessions, student mentors must work with the professors to ensure students have assignments to complete, and that mentoring is available at convenient hours. This is an ongoing project that will continue its development and its implementation in the following semesters.