Page 2 - Demo

2 Introduction
mentoring, this has often meant a tenured or long-time member of the de- partment or school paired with one or more tenure track or non-tenured junior faculty. In student-to-student mentoring, this has often implied that a junior or senior or more advanced graduate student is paired with one or more first- or second-year students. In both undergraduate and graduate education, the pairing of a full-time faculty member with an upper division or graduate student has also been a familiar configuration.
However, among both faculty and students, a framework of peer men- toring has been increasingly prevalent, building on the concepts of a colle- gial group of faculty, and a community of students, or, broadly speaking, a “learning community.” In the literature on mentoring, such peer-oriented relationships, whether one-to-one or one-to-many, whether brief in time or in an extended series of contacts, or more group-oriented with perhaps only a nominal facilitator or leader, can all be considered part of a “mutual mentoring” model (Yun & Sorcinelli, 2009). This mutual mentoring model is premised on the idea that there is no hierarchical relationship be- tween mentor and mentee (or the interaction at least is non-hierarchical in nature), and a mentee seeks out a network of different mentors at different times, perhaps to fulfill different needs.
However, peer mentoring, involving two people of approximately equal status but in which the mentor has more experience or expertise in a particular area, can be structured as a one-to-one interaction in which the mentor and mentee are matched for a specific period of time. This type of peer mentoring has been particularly common in online education due to the fact that a mentor for online learning or teaching must necessarily have more experience in that environment in order to be truly helpful to a mentee, who is new and less experienced in online education. A variety of different peer mentoring configurations are the subject of Chapters 2 and 5.
This book will provide you with examples of successful mentoring models for both faculty and students who are teaching and learning fully or partially online, or who can only meet online or mostly online. We also address cases of predominantly face-to-face teaching and learning envi- ronments, in which online mentoring is able to facilitate otherwise impos- sible, difficult, or inconvenient mentoring relationships and interactions. Online mentoring can facilitate the preparation for teaching and learn- ing online, providing greater accessibility and availability for faculty and students who rely heavily on utilizing remote campus resources, or may foster connections with external professional or career mentors. Whether your ultimate goal is to support better online teaching and learning expe- riences or to enhance mostly in-person education, we hope you will find some ideas here that you can adopt or adapt to best suit your own situation or the needs of your institution.