STUDENTS' EVALUATION OF SUCCESS IN AN ONLINE MENTORING PROGRAM

Abstract

This paper examines the contributors to a successful online educational program. In particular, it focuses on an online mentoring program called Tracking Canada's Past (TCP) which was implemented in three high schools in British Columbia, Canada, in 2003. Tracking Canada's Past investigated the application of online mentoring in the high school history curriculum through the use of Knowledge Forum® software–a web-based group workspace in which students could share and discuss their ongoing research with their online mentors and other students. The goal of TCP project was to help students understand the concept of history as a discipline through online mentoring and the use of “primary” sources, in addition to standard textbooks. There were 72 students and 16 online mentors involved in this study, approximately one mentor for each group of 5-11 students. Through a series of pre- and post-program surveys and interviews, data were collected on the students' backgrounds, expectations for specific mentoring functions, affective responses to mentoring, and the mentoring functions they recognized receiving. Volunteer mentors were also asked about the mentoring functions and the type of advice they would offer to their students. Findings from this study indicated that students' judgments of a successful online mentoring program were best predicted by the helpfulness of the questions mentors asked, the usefulness of the reading materials and/or web resources they recommended, the helpfulness of mentors in developing questions or ideas to investigate, the level of trust students placed in their mentors, and the helpfulness of the online workspace where students and mentors shared their ideas. These findings suggest that the most important determinants of a successful online mentoring program are those that online program designers have the ability to refine over time.