Mentoring plays an important role in the success and or failure of doctoral learners. The experiences that one garners from a traditional doctoral education model provide opportunities and access to conventional mentorship and support that allows a learner to build on the knowledge and experience needed to be an academic professional. However, the same cannot be said for e-learners. Building and sustaining a meaningful mentor-mentee relationship has presented some challenges. This chapter utilizes the conceptual framework of Yob and Crawford to offer strategies to build capacity of best practices for mentorship among doctoral e-learners. The discussion will be organized using five of the seven attributes of Yob and Crawford's conceptual framework for mentoring: competence, personal qualities, availability, communication, and emotional support. This work has implications for mentors, doctoral e-learners, higher education faculty, as well as higher learning institutions.
TopIntroduction
The rise of e-learning among doctoral students has expanded within the last decade, and the advancement of technology in education and meeting the needs of individuals’ accessibility to ongoing learning, are the prime factors leading the charge for this non-traditional pathway to earning a terminal degree (Parker et. al., 2017). However, the uptick in numbers among doctoral e-learners is a double-edged sword. On one hand, as e-learning advances as a normative avenue for the delivery of instruction, there comes an increase in enrollment, pushing higher education institutions to diversify degree program options to meet the unique needs of learners. But current data reveals that an alarming number of e-learners fail to successfully complete their programs. To date, approximately 70% of e-learners enrolled in a doctoral program did not finish (Rigler, 2017). The high attrition rate among doctoral e-learners has highlighted the problem that this group of students is far more susceptible to dropping out of their programs compared to their traditional pathway (face-to-face) learning counterparts (Terrell et al., 2012). But why? One of the main barriers at the core of this problem is the lack of best practices for mentorship of doctoral e-learners.
In this chapter, you will take away research-based best practices for mentorship of doctoral e-learners. Examples of these best practices will be shared to show how intentional implementation of such can aid in the successful completion of programs among doctoral e-learners. Furthermore, this chapter will provide a synthesis of my own experience as a doctoral e-learner who faced extensive obstacles and how access to intentional, effective, and competent mentorship could have benefitted my doctoral experience.
The chapter begins with a brief reflection on my own experience as a doctoral e-learner. Next, it provides a context of mentorship and mentoring between face-to-face and e-learners, followed by a discussion of strategies to build the capacity of best practices for mentorship of doctoral e-learners. A brief discussion of the implications is presented. The chapter concludes with a list of action steps that can be used to enact recommendations.