Using social networks for supervising and mentoring

Abstract

In this paper we describe the experience of the high school and university teachers with using social networks for supervising. We aimed at mentoring of small groups such as student theses and group projects. To support our claims, we performed a qualitative and quantitative study along with an experiment of using social networks in supervising. The studies were answered by multiple high school and university students and teachers. The results of the studies and the experiment are described in this paper. Although social networks have the potential to be used in supervising, they also have a lot of disadvantages making their adoption harder. Existing solutions such as Ning resolved some of these issues, but they are not tailored for supervising. To answer to the results, we describe an outline of the future prototype as a possible solution. We believe that integration of existing solutions is the key to achieve successful results. In our future research, we will leverage not only from the knowledge of the target group of university and high school teachers, but we will also apply experience from practice by cooperating with the Fpt Slovakia, s.r.o. company with the aim of directly preparing students for practice. This paper emerged from the cooperation of the Technical university of Kosice, Ostrovskeho high school and the software company Fpt Slovakia, s.r.o.