Over the last few decades, institutions of higher education have begun to offer a wide range of graduate programs in traditional, hybrid, and online formats. This has made education more accessible to diverse, nontraditional students with busy schedules. While there is an abundance of research that describes online course design and instruction fewer studies describe how faculty have begun to change the way they mentor nontraditional students with full-time jobs, children, and limited access to campus and faculty. This chapter addresses this gap in the literature by describing how an education professor and doctoral students overcame the barriers of time and space by using the co-mentoring-based reciprocity, grounded in humanizing pedagogy, to create digital spaces for mutually beneficial teaching and scholarship projects. Readers can critique the five illustrative examples, draw inspiration from them, and consider ways in which they can tap into the benefits of creating digital spaces for co-mentoring.
TopChanging Demographics And Competing Demands On Students And Faculty
Education is a lot more accessible now than ever before. The term “massification” is being used to describe the growing number of students who are now seeking a college education (Janošcová & Hvorecký, 2020). Distance education, which includes both hybrid and online instruction, now includes a growing number of international students, stay-at-home parents, working professionals, and second-career professionals who might otherwise not have considered going back to school. These non-traditional learners who appreciate the convenience and flexibility of online learning while juggling other life activities (Salvo et al., 2017; Stone & O’Shea, 2019; Xu & Jaggars, 2013) may need support in several areas.
Faculty need to bridge the wide variation in the skill level of non-traditional students who embark on graduate and post-graduate degrees across delivery models. These students may need to further develop their employment-related skills, knowledge of discipline, and academic writing skills. They also need emotional support throughout their journey. Some are noticeably confident; others face graduate school with trepidation. Either way, they all need to learn technical and literacy skills of their discipline. Denicolo and Reeves (2014) describe these as “IT skills either for all of, or combination of, reviewing the literature, collecting data, data analysis and presentation though PowerPoint, interactive whiteboards or other formats” (p.33). They may also need to develop their interpersonal skills. This includes learning how to interact with colleagues, faculty, administrators, supervisors, gatekeepers, and peers within and beyond their discipline (Bice et al. 2022). Finally, students need to develop their academic literacy and numeracy. This includes reading critically; copyright, attribution, and plagiarism; the ethics and practice of co-authorship, professional integrity, intellectual property rights, etc. (Denicolo & Reeves, 2014).
We now have greater clarity about obstacles non-traditional graduate and post graduate students face in hybrid and online programs. Empirical evidence shows that the needs of different subgroups may vary. For example, Rodrigo (2020) reported that only 66% of Black households sampled in the U.S. had access to broadband. This suggests that some Black students may need assistance in overcoming barriers to online education. Variability may also exist across nationalities. Dunn’s (2020) mixed method study, which included 291 survey respondents and 19 interviewees, revealed that foreign-born students in the study appeared to be more ready for online learning than their U.S.-born peers. Green (2015; cited in Mendez et al., 2020) reported that “underrepresented minorities regularly describe feelings of being undervalued and excluded in their doctoral studies, craving mentorship that provides practical and emotional support to successfully navigate academia” (p. 375). Akojie et al.’s (2019) qualitative meta-analysis, highlighted additional obstacles that include balancing work, family and school, and a sense of isolation. To flourish academically, these students need to have access to support systems and faculty who welcome and nurture their unique skillset.