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Introduction
Online education can be a challenging and sometimes bewildering en- vironment for faculty and students alike. When online education was a relatively new phenomenon, faculty and students who had even limited experience teaching and learning online both quickly gravitated toward welcoming the “newbies” (new to online) on board, sharing insights, tips, and strategies in what was a rapidly evolving learning environment for all. In this way, informal mentoring relationships and networks can be said to have long been characteristic of the online experience. During the COVID pandemic, a rapid adoption of emergency remote, i.e. online teaching and learning, upended what had hitherto been a rather steadily evolving and expanding trend in online education and disrupted the more deliberate preparation and training regimens that had developed over the last 20 years or so.
What we refer to as “mentoring” is generally thought of as an interper- sonal relationship in which one party provides guidance, direction, mode- ling of behaviors or approaches, information, or encouragement to others. It may even result in a type of apprenticeship or sponsorship to another (or more than one other). The mentee is someone who is typically new to, less expert, or less familiar with an area of knowledge, or a profession, or who seeks to be introduced and inducted into a greater community. Because mentoring often requires high-touch communication, and is grounded in a relationship of trust, it is more traditionally associated with in-person in- teractions and settings rather than the online ones. Nonetheless, before the age of omnipresent electronic and digital communications, when a mentor and a mentee found themselves far apart, mentoring was carried out quite intimately and often successfully through other means of communicating at a distance, including written correspondence. So being able to sustain a mentoring relationship online should perhaps not be viewed in such a startling light.
In the educational setting, mentoring relationships are often depicted as consisting of a more senior or veteran member of the community provid- ing guidance to a more junior or neophyte mentee. In faculty-to-faculty
DOI: 10.4324/9780429434754-1