Doctoral E-mentoring: Current Practices and Effective Strategies

Abstract

Effective mentoring has been the cornerstone of a successful doctoral experience. Traditional doctoral education uses an apprenticeship model for mentoring to help students learn what is required as an academic professional. However, online environments present unique challenges to creating and maintaining mentor-mentee relationships. Using keywords specific to e-mentoring and online graduate education, literature searches were conducted to isolate relevant research from the last decade. From this literature, it was possible to synthesize current practices in e-mentoring and identify effective strategies to use for doctoral students conducting research. Using Yob and Crawford (2012) framework, results were organized into the following six independent categories: Competence, Availability, Induction, Challenge, Communication, and Emotional Support. Other aspects that impact the mentoring relationship are also discussed.

Mentoring Graduate Students Online: Strategies and Challenges

“…This resulted in 24 articles from 20 journals worldwide. We then included literature reviews that focused on graduate mentoring at a distance (Byrnes et al, 2019;Columbaro, 2009;Deshpande, 2017;Nasiri & Mafakheri, 2015), leading to a total of 28 articles from 22 journals worldwide (Table 1). These four literature reviews focused solely on online doctoral student mentoring whereas our broader literature review examined both master's and doctoral student mentoring online across disciplines.…”

“…Frequent communication has been identified as critical to the online mentoring relationship (Broome et al, 2011;de Janasz & Godshalk, 2013;Jacobs et al, 2015;Kumar & Coe, 2017) as it helps to foster immediacy and reduces temporal distance that can create difficulties in the relationship (Duffy et al, 2018;Nasiri & Mafakheri, 2015). The emphasis on communication in the literature, coupled with students' need for timely, clear, and constructive feedback as well as encouragement, indicated that online mentors should have technical, communication, social, and cognitive competencies (Byrnes et al, 2019;Erichsen et al, 2014;Kumar et al, 2013;Schichtel, 2010). Both faculty mentors and student mentees emphasized the need for an awareness of netiquette-communicating politely and with care online-as asynchronous communication opens the potential for miscommunication due to the absence of body language, vocal intonation, and facial expression.…”

“…Because of this, providing a structure for online mentoring and negotiating explicit expectations and agreements at the outset of the mentoring relationship has been seen as an important strategy (Andrew, 2012;Jacobs et al, 2015;Kumar et al, 2013;Kumar & Johnson, 2017Suciati, 2011). Maintaining consistency of mentoring interactions, as well as frequency, was also important (Byrnes et al, 2019;Rademaker et al, 2016). Establishing predictable virtual office hours was suggested as one way of accomplishing this (Nasiri & Mafakheri, 2015), as was scheduling regular meetings or updates (Kumar et al, 2013;Kumar & Johnson, 2019).…”

Inovação Na Educação Superior

“…No que tange à educação, alguns estudos sobre programas de mentoria existentes em cursos de graduação e pós-graduação têm constatado os benefícios que esta relação traz, tanto para o mentor quanto para o mentorado, tais como, satisfação, produtividade, melhora das relações interpessoais, entre outros (Parker-Katz & Bay, 2008;Robnett et al, 2018;Adriaensen, Bijsmans, & Groen, 2019;Byrnes Junior et al, 2019;Lachenaye et al, 2019;& Ong et al, 2019).…”

“…Alguns estudos têm comprovado a eficácia da mentoria acadêmica realizada para o desenvolvimento de competências de pesquisa em alunos de pós-graduação (Robnett et al, 2018;Byrnes Junior et al, 2019), para o desenvolvimento de competências gerais em estudantes participantes da metodologia de aprendizagem baseada em problemas (PBL) (Adriaensen, Bijsmans, & Groen, 2019), para o desenvolvimento de competências técnicas e de pesquisa em estudantes de medicina (Ong et al, 2019) A mentoria eficaz tem sido associada a taxas de sucesso crescentes (Khan & Gogos, 2013;Pinto Zipp, Cahill, & Clark, 2009), aumentando as taxas de retenção (Khan & Gogos, 2013;Mason, 2012), e ajudando a inserir os alunos na comunidade acadêmica (Curtin, Malley, & Stewart, 2016;Gardner, 2008), enquanto a mentoria ineficaz pode ter efeitos opostos (Jones, 2013). O estudo de Lachenaye et al (2019) apresenta a avaliação de um processo de mentoria por pares, realizado no treinamento de novos profissionais, e que trouxe um maior senso de pertencimento entre os participantes, especialmente em temas semelhantes de sua formação, proporcionando uma maior abertura para o compartilhamento de dificuldades e busca de aprendizados.…”