Prepared by: Dorothy Bennett, Naomi Hupert, Kallen Tsikalas, Terri Meade, Margaret Honey at EDC / Center for Children and Technology.

Over the last five years, the widespread use of email and the web has opened up a broad range of educational possibilities for students. As a result, online mentoring via the Internet has proliferated in the form of collaborative projects and special programs to provide resources for students and educators across the country. Yet, many questions remain about how to structure and support online relationships and how to scale-up such programs to reach a broad range of participants.

Beginning in 1994 and with funding from the National Science Foundation, EDC’s Center for Children and Technology (CCT) conducted a three-year experimental project to develop Internet-based telementoring environments that link high school girls in science and technology courses with practicing professionals for ongoing guidance and support. Telementoring aimed to create online environments in which young women in high school could safely discuss their school experiences and feelings with practicing women professionals who had "made it" in science and technical fields. In turn, these professionals could constructively address many of the girls’ apprehensions, tensions, and conflicts and help sustain their interest in science and technology.

Mentoring programs specifically designed to sustain the interests of high school girls in science and technology are currently available in a wide variety of forms. While many of these programs have succeeded in raising career awareness, few have provided widespread opportunities for girls to receive sustained support for dealing with the psycho-social and emotional issues that come into play as they pursue courses in nontraditional fields of science and technology. Because high school girls have no easy access to professionals, telecommunications appeared to be a particularly effective medium in which to provide this kind of support.

Over the course of the Telementoring project, we learned a great deal about: 1) the short-term impact of telementoring experiences on participants--both students and mentors; and 2) the issues and challenges that arise in designing and supporting online mentoring environments which focus on building "relationships" among people who never meet face-to-face. In this paper, we will describe some of these findings. Additionally, two research reports on the Telementoring project are available from EDC’s Center for Children and Technology.

The primary goal of the Telementoring project was to help create relationships between younger and older people for career counseling and personal guidance. Telementoring was developed from the premise that merely getting people online is not enough; to fully utilize the strengths of online communication, attention and care must be paid to building and maintaining a sense of community online among participants. To accomplish these goals, the project consisted of three phases of work over a three-year period: formative research to develop the project components in Year 1, a pilot implementation in ten schools in Year 2, and a larger scale implementation of the program in Year 3.

Students in the project represented six states (Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico, New York, and Tennessee) and were recruited from science, math, computer science, and engineering classes. Mentors were recruited in-person at professional conferences and online through a range of listservs that reach women from diverse backgrounds who work in the sciences and technical fields. During its three years, the Telementoring project connected over 250 young women with professional women in science, mathematics, and engineering.

To support these participants, we developed a number of online communication formats and resources. These included:

Through qualitative and quantitative research with students and mentors, we found that participants went far beyond our expectations of what they would explore in their online relationships. While the Telementoring program was primarily about career mentoring—linking young women with an interest in science, mathematics, or computing with professional women in these fields—it became immediately clear that, for the most part, girls’ conflicts about their personal lives as young adults were preeminent and integrally associated with any academic and career issues that they had. Telementoring offered many opportunities to explore a broad range of these issues in an interconnected and personal way, which appeared to be most valued by students. Perhaps most prevalent in Telementoring relationships were instances in which mentors helped students craft strategies for dealing with the daunting transition from high school to college. This included discussions about selecting college courses, balancing their personal relationships with their academic interests, and overcoming personal or financial obstacles that stood in the way of pursuing particular goals.

We also learned that Telementoring can have a positive effect on students’ perceptions of women in science and technology. However, our research revealed some of the complexities involved in promoting and assessing career awareness among students who are still far removed from the world of work. Specific discussions about careers in science and technology were not immediately obvious in students’ online exchanges with mentors. Mentors’ comments on evaluation surveys revealed that they had high expectations for specific career-oriented conversations. On the other hand, students revealed that they had gained further insight into science and technology and the kinds of exciting lifestyles possible in these fields, especially when these issues emerged organically from a discussion of students’ and mentors’ immediate interests and hobbies. These data suggest that what mentors might have regarded as casual chat, students often viewed as meaningful exchanges.

This issue raises questions about how to promote career development online at this stage in young women’s development. At the crux of these findings is the notion that career mentoring online requires finding ways to address girls’ immediate interests while simultaneously broadening their relatively narrow understanding of how their interests connect to the world of work.

Through our research and development work, we learned a great deal about the social dimensions of mentoring in the electronic medium. This meant identifying strategies for promoting productive dialogue online and developing appropriate support structures that enable participants to build relationships with each other. In implementing Telementoring, we identified three key design issues that were critical to the success of the program:

• Managing Participant Expectations through Online Preparation
• Facilitation Techniques for Working in the Online Medium
• Dealing with Diversity Online.

Each of these are discussed below, with an eye toward future program development.

Despite the distribution of orientation and recruitment materials highlighting the goals and objectives of the project, our research showed that many individuals, including mentors, students, and teachers, did not know what to expect from a mentoring relationship. This was compounded by a lack of experience with developing and sustaining online relationships. As a result, participants’ expectations were often significantly different from one another’s and from those envisioned by project staff. This presented a design challenge that required the project to develop strategies for building a shared understanding of the project’s goals and at the same time responding to the differing needs of students, mentors, and teachers.

Mentors often assumed they would be mentoring someone who is essentially like their own remembered high school self. These memories often did not include the intense social pressures and concerns that our project’s students experienced in their lives. Rather, mentors’ memories included a serious focus on academics, college, and the world of work. Getting mentors to recognize that students vary greatly from each other and from a mentor’s own experience was crucial to preparation for the mentoring role. In addition, many mentors were unaware of the day-to-day workings of schools that impact students’ work. Reminding mentors that students did not have continuous email access and often could reply to messages only twice a week was very important in mitigating hard feelings on the part of many mentors who expected immediate responses from their students.

Students, too, came to the project with their own set of expectations. Many held stereotypical images of women scientists and expected that their mentors would be "too old to relate to a student," "stuffy," and "not so friendly." At the same time, many students expected only to chat with their mentors, viewing them as pen pals or acquaintances who would be interested in their relationships to family, friends, and boyfriends. Some students expected to focus exclusively on projects that were class assignments.

Teachers’ expectations generally fell into two categories: either they saw the mentors serving as project mentors for their students’ project work, or they saw them as completely outside of the school curriculum and providing supportive relationships for the students. In addition, many teachers were unsure of how they should relate to their students’ mentors, and some expected to play no role once the project was initiated.

Given these divergent understandings, project staff worked to promote more reasonable and shared expectations among mentors, students, and teachers. This was done in two ways:

Both approaches helped to reduce inappropriate expectations on the part of different participant groups. However, the online "prep sessions" were significantly more effective because they elicited active discussion around key issues that helped to dynamically shape participants’ understanding of Telementoring.

Online Preparation Sessions.

Online "prep" sessions were designed for each cluster of participants in the project — mentors, teacher liaisons, and students. Each prep session varied in its structure and resulted in varying levels of success.

Mentor preparation. The mentor prep sessions followed a highly structured format which spanned approximately three weeks and included groups of fifteen to twenty mentors subscribed to mailing lists which we referred to as "mentor lounges." Each mentor prep group included a mentor trainer (either a project staff person or an experienced Telementor) who had been given a detailed guide for facilitating online training and ongoing support from project staff.

The mentor prep sessions presented three scenarios highlighting issues drawn from student interviews conducted during the first pilot year of the project. The issues concerned:

In addition, all mentors were asked to complete a brief biography of themselves to share with their future mentee, and to describe a day in their lives at work — a virtual office visit.

Each scenario and task was introduced by an online facilitator whose primary role was to model the kinds of interactions that would be expected of mentors: responding promptly to posts, using language that is clear, demonstrating an openness to other’s ideas and opinions through inviting a variety of solutions to a problem, and through encouraging participants to comment on each other’s postings.

While the content of the three scenarios was considered important, staff saw the scenarios as vehicles for communicating the larger goals of the project to the mentors, including:

Once trainings were completed, the mailing lists remained available for mentors to discuss issues and concerns arising in their mentoring relationships. Overall, mentor preparation was the most significant and well-received component of our project. Mentors reported that they gained specific strategies for dealing with issues that their students raised in the context of their relationships. Perhaps more importantly, mentors felt supported by their peers and able to use each other as a resource throughout the project.

Student Preparation. To help prepare students for their online relationships with mentors, students were subscribed to separate mailing lists known as "student lounges." The lounges were essentially unmoderated listservs that accommodated 7 to 50 students, depending on the year. In the pilot year, the student lounge had proved to be a valuable place for allowing the girls to make connections with each other and also to become familiar with expressing themselves clearly in an online medium. As we scaled up in Years 2 and 3, we thought of the student lounge much more as a place in which students could prepare for their relationships with their mentors and meet project requirements by:

• Creating a biography that describes their background and interests

• Drafting a set of burning questions that they have for their mentors

• Responding to research queries.

In Year 2, students from the first-year pilot were recruited to serve as facilitators of the student lounges, responsible for orienting students to the project and helping them make connections with peers around the country. In making this structural change, we discovered that student facilitators needed far more support than we had realized in dealing with the diverse interests and conflicts that arose in the lounges and diffusing these conflicts effectively online. As a result, we decided in Year 3 to maintain the lounges as places for students to share and test out their personal biographies introducing themselves to mentors. Once students completed their biographies, the online lounges were wide open for students to use as they wished. They were largely seen as informal opportunities for students from a broad range of schools to have access to a larger community of support among girls their own age.

Teacher Liaison Preparation. Teachers serving as project liaisons were primarily responsible for upstarting Telementoring in their own classes--recruiting female students, hosting orientation meetings for students and their parents at their schools, filling out necessary paperwork, and matching students with mentors provided by CCT. To assist teachers with their responsibilities, we created a separate mailing list known as the "teacher lounge." Teachers were engaged in a series of discussions to help understand the project goals and to answer questions regarding the program.

Teachers indicated that they did not always have the time to get online and respond to messages. Instead, they were most interested in raising specific implementation issues as they came up during the project. As a result, the teacher lounge evolved more into a space in which administrative and project announcements were made. In lieu of extensive online discussions, all teachers received a Quick Guide to Getting Started and a Telementoring Orientation video that highlighted project goals from the perspectives of former mentors and students in the program.

Providing online training and orientation for mentors and students allowed project staff to introduce many common pitfalls of online communication to participants prior to engaging in mentoring relationships. This also gave staff an opportunity to help participants identify their own expectations, develop realistic goals, become familiar with the online environment, trouble-shoot technical difficulties, and acquire some familiarity with online communication conventions.

Though staff regarded both members of any given mentoring pair as equal contributors to the overall relationship, greater emphasis was placed on training the mentors for several reasons:

Students and teachers, on the other hand, were far less able and willing to participate in extended online training for a variety of reasons:

Through further refinement of materials and online prep sessions, the project succeeded in maintaining a common level of expectation and promoting an understanding of the online environment and its limitations. Online prep sessions were most useful to adult mentors.

A project centered on personal interactions mediated entirely by electronic communication presents many benefits and also potential obstacles. What kinds of information will participants need to enter into conversation successfully with others? What kinds of concerns will participants have? What difficulties will result from the non-visual and non-auditory environment that participants are expected to use for meaningful communication? Online facilitation techniques and strategies were essential in helping participants feel comfortable and confident in communicating online in both one-on-one relationships and in group discussions. In this discussion, we will focus exclusively on facilitation techniques that we found to be effective for one-on-one relationships.

Once mentors and students were matched, Telementoring was entirely reliant on the interactions that would take place between these pairs via private email between the mentor and the student. Overall, Telementoring relationships were satisfactory for mentors and students. However, in interviews and evaluation surveys, students repeatedly mentioned a number of factors related to the online medium itself that influenced how relationships developed.

While it was clear that there was no set path to success, there were many moments in which students and mentors could connect on a deep level. When a mentor’s biography included enough personal information, it could often help generate more substantive conversation. Similarly, through exploring common interests (music, major hobbies, television programs), student-mentor conversations could often wander into deeper issues around career perceptions and aspirations. Humor and lightheartedness in mentor communications often gave students the permission to be silly as well as serious. And finally, direct questioning about the details of one’s daily life sometimes led to larger questions and issues. Specifically, there were a few pointed strategies that appeared to be critical in helping online relationships thrive.

Attention to Personal Details. Most commonly, students appreciated their mentors’ attention to personal details about their lives. For example, one student commented that her mentor looked on the map to find her town. Another noted that her mentor referred to what she had previously written and commented directly on these ideas. These examples suggest that students derive a sense of being listened to and being valued from this sort of attention to detail, and that this is especially important online when mentors and their students do not meet face-to-face.

Direct Affirmations. Students also reported feeling important to their mentors (and subsequently more invested in continuing the relationship) when their mentors told them so directly. One student beamed, "My mentor said I feel like I can talk to you about anything and that I’m mature." Another said that her mentor had told her how happy she was to see her (the student’s) email message in her in box; it had made her day.

• Wow! I am sooooo proud of you for being such a trooper...

• I noticed right away that you have good writing skills. I don’t know why that dawned on me...

• I enjoyed your last two email messages very much. It sounds like you are one busy, but well-balanced person!

Personal Presence. Students appreciated knowing their mentors as more than just an email address or text on the screen. Emoticons, little drawings at the bottom of messages, anecdotes of daily life, and humor seemed especially important to the students’ increased sense of their mentors as people. One student commented: "The way she makes me laugh is the most memorable about her. I like the way she expresses herself, and the way she opens herself in order to open myself too."

• Have a good day. Say hi to your mom and Joe [the student’s boyfriend] for me.

• Anyway, my fingers are saying hasta la vista or, since you’re a member of the french club, a bientot et bonne nuit!!

Determining What Is Off-Limits. Students (and mentors, for that matter) subtly negotiated which topics were appropriate for discussion and which were better left untouched. Students held varying beliefs about suitable topics. One felt she could not talk about family issues with her mentor because her mentor had only one daughter and might not understand. Another student was interested in talking about teaching but said her mentor clearly wanted to talk about engineering, so she didn’t pursue the matter.

To help them determine what was appropriate and inappropriate, students often posed "test" questions to their mentors. For instance, one participant said, "I tested to see if she would respond to something personal, like church. But she didn’t, so I didn’t bring it up anymore." Another related that after receiving her mentor’s "day in my life" description, she asked whether she was supposed to be the way her mentor was and communicate about the same things. Her mentor quickly assured her that she could be and communicate about anything she wished. This permission opened up the conversation and allowed the relationship to develop in the ways the student needed.

Experience and Comfort with Communicating Online. Most of the students participating in Telementoring had some prior experience using email and the Internet. Technical knowledge about email interfaces and web browsers, however, did not necessarily correspond with the ability to communicate effectively through the online medium. Indeed, students commented on this gap in skills. One student said, "I’m better at email and the Internet now. I learned how to make things clear in writing. You can be more humorous on the computer once you’re familiar with it." Another related, "There’s a need to master how to make things clear in your writing since messages can be read the wrong way." Given that students’ facility with the online medium takes time and experience to develop, one must not rush to judgment about conversational difficulties encountered early on in the relationship. It is very likely that these difficulties might be due to rusty communication skills rather than personality mismatches. In these instances, mentors may have to take the lead by modeling effective online communication in their exchanges.

Our observations suggest that in order for online conversations to lead to depth, intimacy, and sharing, students must feel (a) valued; (b) that their mentors are more than just email addresses and text on a screen; (c) that they are engaged in a relationship, one in which they are not just being advised but rather one in which they are putting out ideas and being listened to. Furthermore, participants must be aware of certain attributes of the medium (for instance, limited nonverbal cues which lead students to ascribe more importance to factors such as silence) when building effective relationships online.

Our work with open-ended discussion lists raised significant issues about how to address issues of diversity online. One of the most common perceptions about electronic communication is that it is free of gender, race, and age. Senders of email are unseen, their physical attributes are invisible. As a result there is a common belief that email communication is bias-free and can break down barriers that exist in face-to-face communication. In preparing for the Telementoring project, staff were concerned that simply removing visual information as a component of communication would not eliminate differences due to the diversity of students and adults communicating with each other online. Our work would require documenting and understanding how issues of diversity arise online.

Issues of appropriate online behavior, correct grammar, choice of vocabulary, stated social and academic preferences and practices, and differences in economic status all figured large in discussions and sometimes heated disagreements among the project’s participants. Our interviews with students revealed that Telementoring participants were often assuming certain personal characteristics on the basis of where people lived, what they mentioned in their postings, and what they gleaned from the tone of the message.

Examples the types of diversity issues that arose in online conversations included:

One of the ways project staff chose to address diversity issues was through the project’s online prep sessions for mentors and students. Though these trainings varied significantly in content and duration, they each provided, through modeling by online facilitators, a way of communicating via email that is clear, includes evidence of an individual’s personality, and is acknowledging and supportive of individual differences. In all online interactions, project staff worked to:

1. Model the online behavior expected of all participants (such as ways of clearly expressing thoughts and feelings, ways of acknowledging others’ comments).
1. Ensure that the online space is "safe" so that no individual feels excluded or unwelcome because of difference in background, religion, race, etc. This requires that all participants clearly understand a set of communication ground rules which include provisions for addressing inappropriate behavior.
1. Ensure that all opinions and points of view are welcome and not judged.

Staff made every effort to acknowledge that differences exist through direct online facilitation as well as indirect modeling of online communication. This was done by informing all participants that many others who were part of the project came from different backgrounds and had varying experiences, and pointing out that online diversity can play a visible and positive role, broadening the perspectives of all involved. Staff also took action when necessary to defuse a conflict.

All of the program components described thus far were accompanied by significant challenges concerning scale-up and sustainability. While we had initially hoped that some of the processes and procedures would be taken on by schools, it became clear through our research that this expectation was unrealistic. The amount of administration and online facilitation required to support and sustain relationships online went well beyond the capacities of the already burdened teachers volunteering to participate in the program. As a result, CCT project staff took on the bulk of the responsibility for recruiting, preparing, and matching participants. We believe, however, that if online mentoring is to be more widespread, a number of sustainability issues must be considered.

Growing Experts from Within. As the project scaled up, we needed to accommodate an increasing number of mentors in online preparation sessions. Using past mentors as trainers of new mentors proved to be an excellent way of passing on some of the experiences from the previous year.

Administrative Support. The human infrastructure needed to support and sustain such a program cannot be overestimated. When working with students under the age of eighteen, network use agreements and parental-consent forms add an additional layer of administrative work. Contemplating who will be part of the administrative infrastructure to take on these different tasks is critical before setting up a program.

Incentives and Roles for Teachers. While most schools applying for the program were enthusiastic about getting their students involved, once students were matched to mentors many teachers felt quite distant from the program after completing their administrative duties. Defining appropriate roles and incentives for participating teachers is necessary from the outset, while at the same time being respectful of teachers’ available time.

Technical Support. Obvious though it may be, technical support is critical to the process of telementoring. Some schools encountered severe technical difficulties during the course of the project, limiting online access time for students. Evaluating access might also include examining school or district policies for student email use along with technical considerations.

The Right Fit. Schools were somewhat ambivalent about how a telementoring program fit with their curricular goals and practices. This raised the issue of whether classrooms are the only appropriate setting for the type of online career counseling that the Telementoring project provided. Community-based organizations or libraries equipped with the appropriate technologies might provide more ample time for students to communicate freely with mentors on a regular basis without the added pressure of meeting their class work deadlines. Teachers also suggested that such a program might fit best within the guidance office of schools, where students are seeking out specific advice for selecting colleges and careers.

Tailoring Program to Local Needs. It was impossible to anticipate the broad range of students’ interests and needs that we confronted in the Telementoring project. To be successful, a Telementoring project must be adaptable and responsive to local conditions and needs. This means that mentors must be made aware of the various roles they might need to play that do not always accord exactly with the larger project goals.

Flexibility in Timing. The timing of Telementoring project activities and recruitment need to be flexible and cyclical. This means structuring recruitment, matching, preparation, and discussion events on a rolling basis to accommodate the varying schedules of different schools.

Smaller Units of Implementation and Scale-Up. The quality of technical access differed depending on state and local school networking initiatives. For these reasons, scale-up strategies might best be implemented on a district and state level, rather than the national level. This would allow the program to be tailored to the specific needs of local communities and to successfully build on the resources they already have available.

Distributed Responsibilities through Strategic Partnerships. Mentor recruitment, online preparation, matching, and facilitation were key ingredients of the program. To make such a program sustainable, strategic alliances with businesses, local communities and professional agencies are necessary to help take on these various responsibilities. This might mean a combination of centralized activities (such as mentor recruitment or training) performed by national or professional associations.