Can Online Peer-Review Systems Support Group Mentorship?

Abstract

As we are entering the age of open social e-learning environments, group (peer) mentorship becomes an increasingly important mode of learning. The academic peer review system can be viewed as a group mentorship system. Peer reviews have been used for over a century by the research community to provide not only quality control for publishing new research contributions, but also as a way to provide constructive feedback to the authors and help them to improve their work. There are two critical questions that need to be addressed in both peer-review and group peer mentorship: 1) how to motivate reviewers (mentors) to give serious, detailed and constructive feedback, 2) how to find good reviewers (mentors) for a particular author (mentee). This research addresses the above questions in the context of a group online peer-mentorship system aimed at improving the writing skills of university students using a conference peer review model.