Mentor Mentoring Technology
I'm a technologist at heart and I have always hated to see people struggle with something that I know I can help out with. My very second semester in undergrad while I was pursuing a BS degree in computer science, my professor didn't like my work. She told me that I didn't seem to be getting it and maybe I should go back and repeat the first course again. I was intimidated. I didn't feel like I fit in with the others in my program. I wasn't geeky. I didn't like staying in the computer lab till 4am working on code. However, I had resolve and I wanted to prove my professor wrong. If I had a mentor in those early days, I feel like I could have set myself up for success in a much better way or at least had encouraging words from someone on my side. Now I want to be that person who can assist someone who was like me in those early days. If I hadn't pushed through that early adversity, who knows? I probably would be working at a grocery store somewhere (hopefully in the Outer Banks, NC).
My favorite part of being a mentor is the students. And I had a diverse group - one was a 22 year old Asian university student in Alberta, Canada. One was a mid 40's female yoga instructor who didn't have any programming background but worked so hard at learning the material that she ended up being my best student. The other was a conservative Christian who worked at a Christian seminary school.
I really liked SkilledUp's approach to this aspect of online learning - providing a mentor to students. When I first started, the mentor coordinator explained that they wanted to improve the completion rates for students who enroll in online learning courses. They told me that even if a student pays for a course that only around 10% complete the entire course. That seemed very low numbers to me and I was sure they had it wrong. However, I looked back at some of the online courses that I had signed up for in the past - a guitar lesson course, a statistics course on Coursera - and realized I never finished any of those.
This course I mentored was a 6 week course. My approach was to do the entire course as well. I wanted to be able to keep a week or 2 ahead of the students because I found it beneficial to be able to be familiar with the material. When they asked questions, I wanted to be quick with answers. I never pretended that I knew something that I really didn't and when students asked me those types of questions, I simply stated that I didn't know but I would research the answers and get back to them. Based upon the feedback that I received from the students, I think they really appreciated it. I wasn't a pretentious professor, I was a real person who needed to learn as well. I loved taking that particular course! It was a front end development course using HTML5 and CSS3. I have learned many things myself that I use in my full time job.
I connected with all 3 of my students on a personal level as well. Two of them, I still communicate through email and chats with. They ask me how things are going and if I am mentoring again and they send me links to courses that they think I would be interested in taking with them. That's so awesome.
Of course, not everything was rosy. I had some issues at first with my approach with the students. This course was structured so that the students had about 10 lessons per week and a final project to complete at the end of the week. My responsibility was to meet with the students online twice a week for 1 hour apiece and go over any issues and questions the students may have. My first approach was to focus on the weekly lessons and I spent a lot of time on that material. I also met with the mentor coordinator once a week to go over each student and for me to give my impressions on how things were going with each student. Inevitably, the coordinator would ask if the student had completed the final project. I was spending so much time on the weekly lessons that I never got around to asking them about the project. That was my earliest mistake! I quickly learned that SkilledUp really valued the final project. They wanted to see examples of that work on the web. So finally when I got that through my head, things started progressing smoothly I harped on my students to get those projects on the web and then I was able to post the links for the SkilledUp people to see. The developers at SkilledUp, the ones who worked on the material, were so excited to see that work. Matter of fact, my student, the yoga instructor, was the very first student to complete the final, final project. I would have loved to see a bonus or something like that. I think that would encourage the mentors. By providing some kind of bonus or something for the first student to finish. And I think if SkilledUp had explained to the mentors what their expectations were at the beginning, that would have made things smoother for the mentors as well.
Getting back to the course completion rates. I experience first hand how difficult it was to keep students involved and interested in the course. It seems to be around weeks 3 and 4 where the breakdowns start to occur. That's when the material starts to get difficult. That's what separated "the men from the boys" so-to-speak. My university student is a whiz kid. He gets programming and the material. However, he didn't finish the course when he had staked out to a very big lead initially. He was knocking out the weekly lessons and the projects and I was excited. I was sure he would complete the course very quickly. That's when his schedule became tight. He started canceling meetings. He became incommunicado. It was a struggle for me to get him to work on the material. I became frustrated. When we did meet, he explained the only reason he was still involved in the course was out of respect for me. He didn't want to disappoint me. He never finished the course. We still email occasionally. He won a contest for a university project that he was working on where he used a lot of the material he learned in the course on the project. He showed it to me and it was very slick. My other student, the Christian university employee didn't have a good background in programming but he wanted to learn the material for his job. He ended up not finishing the course either
So, out of my 3 students, only 1 completed for a 33% completion rate. The mentor coordinator explained that was about the average completion rate for all students and all mentors.
That probably was the biggest challenge for me in this course: how to keep the student engaged and on track without falling behind. Personal lives and schedules often get in the way. And once the students fell behind, how can I get them back on track again or at least get them to learn a few things even if they have no shot of completing the course? The seminary employee hadn't met with me for 4 weeks but I finally managed to get him to meet because I explained I had something to teach him that he could use at his job.
Mentoring.. good work if you can get it.
