Friday, November 12, 2010

Tips for an eMentor

I am about to become involved in a project where my colleagues and I will be working with a group of people from India who will be enrolling with our Graduate Certificate Tertiary Learning and Teaching. Initially they are coming to work with us face-to-face, but when they go home, we will be continuing to support them online.

With this project in mind, I have been asked to make a few comments about how to be an eMentor.

I was just about to launch into a long post about this, but then found a couple of posts I wrote about being an eMentor last year: Tips for being an effective eMentor. And here is a reflection about my experiences of being an eMentor: My experience of being an eMentor.

In terms of practical advice, I find Skype to be a brilliant tool for one-to-one mentoring, especially if you both have webcam. Ok...I know face-to-face is preferable for a lot of people, but I have found webcam on Skype to be an extremely effective way to communicating with someone as well as building a relationship. Here is some advice from Coach Carole about using Skype for online facilitation which is equally as relevant for eMentoring. And here are some more tips from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Do you have tips 0r ideas for anyone who is thinking about being an eMentor?


Image: 'working in free space'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/48805491@N00/3206216434

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Sarah, to answer your question: yes, we have a great model of ementoring for our echampions and eleaders in community centres in Victoria. We're about to wrap up for the year and we're producing a voicethread that asks our echampions this question: 'Who wants to be an ementor?' When that has been published I'll come back and let you know.

Sarah Stewart said...

Thanks Carole :)