Funders & Partners

The Telementoring Orchestrator project is generously funded by the Office of Learning Technologies.

Partners include:

Learning in Motion

The University of Toronto, and

The University of Hawaii.

The Telementoring Orchestrator

The goal of this project is to develop and test a web-based software product that will help teachers facilitate large numbers of on-line mentoring ("telementoring") relationships for their students.

In this project, we are developing a web-based software product, called the "Telementoring Orchestrator", to facilitate telementoring relationships between K-12 students and knowledgeable adult volunteers. The software will accomplish this by interacting directly with the server component of Knowledge Forum, to assist K- 12 teachers, students and adult volunteers in carrying out telementoring relationships in a large shared workspace. The Telementoring Orchestrator will automatically perform many of the menial organizational tasks that teachers and researchers normally have to perform manually to organize such relationship. This work includes creating "views" within the Knowledge Forum database for small groups of "matched" mentors and students to work in together; and creating Knowledge Forum accounts for volunteer mentors.

Background

Since the mid 90s, Dr. O'Neill and a variety of collaborators have been pursuing a program of applied research directed at creating a productive synergy between schools and workplaces. People face challenges to their learning and development both at school and at work, and these problems can be complementary.

For example, schools are meant to provide a safe and supportive setting in which to learn and grow; but as many in academia and the general public have observed, the lessons taught in school are often isolated from authentic practice and do not transfer well to the 'real world'. At work, the challenges to learning are different, but equally serious. Demands for short-term productivity can discourage the reflection necessary for deep learning, and the mentoring necessary to develop new generations of talent. These problems are especially worrisome to a nation striving toward a strong position in a knowledge-based global economy.

On-line mentoring, or "telementoring" relationships that span workplaces and schools can allow students to exercise their minds on more authentic problems, while offering adults the opportunity to take their eyes off the bottom line briefly, reflect on their accomplishments, and develop broader knowledge and capabilities. For employers, telementoring also provides a cost-effective means of educational outreach.

Over the years, O'Neill and his collaborators have fostered hundreds of telementoring relationships in which knowledgeable adults guide students' and teachers' work on more ambitious academic tasks than they would be able to attempt alone. The mentor/mentee relationships provide a means to have some of the benefits of the work environment at school, while providing adult volunteers with opportunities for learning and personal growth.

Current data suggests a strong potential for volunteer-based telementoring to play an enabling role in creating a new culture of lifelong learning. Studies have shown repeatedly that the likelihood a person will volunteer increases with level of education. Furthermore, when one considers recent figures for educational attainment, voluntarism and home Internet access, the potential number of volunteer telementors in Canada and the US looks quite high. One aim our our lab is to maximize this potential.

Why the Telementoring Orchestrator?

Three key factors currently inhibit the full and equitable realization of this telementoring's potential.

(1) The organizational effort required to locate volunteers and match them with appropriate mentees is a time-consuming task, beyond the capacity of most full-time school staff.

(2) Researchers' limited understanding of the demands that telementoring relationships place on both students and adult volunteers makes telementoring programs less effective today than they could be, in part because the management tasks associated with recruiting and matching volunteers in the telementoring projects now being conducted around North America, are usually performed by university researchers funded through government grants. This approach is unsustainable. Further, it can lead to researchers investing more time in making telementoring happen than in doing the analytical work necessary to understand the relationships, study their consequences, and advance the state of current practice surrounding them.

And (3) the medium that has most frequently been used to sustain telementoring, e-mail, has inherent limitations. Asynchronous, text-based media like e-mail are practical technologies for telementoring, since they allow busy volunteers to contribute their time and thought when it is most convenient for them. (Unlike Real-time audio and video which interrupt busy adults at unpredictable times during the work day.) However, the private nature of e-mail makes it difficult for telementoring relationships to be successful on a fully equitable basis. When mentoring relationships are conducted via private media like e-mail, the students who most need to see close models of successful mentoring are, in fact, the least likely to encounter them. In the worst case this leads to a "rich get richer" dynamic, in which only students with previous experience of supportive learning partnerships are able to draw benefit from them. Evidence from a recently completed study suggests that increased public access to peers' telementoring dialogues can help students develop more sophisticated ideas about what telementoring relationships can and should do for them. O'Neill and Scardamalia used the Knowledge Forum software to support this new model of telementoring, which they dubbed "mentoring in the open".

The Telementoring Orchestrator will confront these three stumbling blocks. It will facilitate "open" telementoring relationships between K-12 students and knowledgeable adult volunteers by interacting directly with the server component of Knowledge Forum to assist K-12 teachers, students and adult volunteers in carrying out telementoring relationships in a large shared workspace. In this setting, mentors and students alike can better learn to make the most of telementoring from their peers' experiences of it.

Interacting directly with the Knowledge Forum server software, the Telementoring Orchestrator will automatically perform some of the menial organizational tasks that are necessary to support telementoring, and which must normally be done by teachers or university staff.