Case Study 1: Improving satisfaction levels of e-mentored students by increasing their engagement and enhancing the learning platform.
Process
We interviewed 19 students and 5 mentors participating in Google Summer of Code, an e-mentoring program for open-source software development. Our goal was to understand how defining the technical task itself and the practices followed to complete it impact important goals of mentoring, like building technical skill and becoming part of a community.
We interviewed 19 students and 5 mentors participating in Google Summer of Code, an e-mentoring program for open-source software development. Our goal was to understand how defining the technical task itself and the practices followed to complete it impact important goals of mentoring, like building technical skill and becoming part of a community.
I initiated research activities by creating the first draft of our interview protocol and scheduling the first few interviews. I divided analysis of 24 one-hour transcripts among my 3 team members, meeting with them weekly to compare everyone’s findings and resolve disagreements. I scheduled these meetings in parallel with ongoing interviews in order to validate our findings with subsequent interviewees, and meet research paper submission deadlines. To make progress on the paper itself, I delegated further interview recruiting and scheduling to other team members.
Results
The analysis resulted in a research publication with practical implications for structuring e-mentoring experiences that meet program goals, and result in more satisfaction and engagement on the platform. For instance, creating opportunities for unstructured contact around project milestones, so students working on back end projects get the chance to receive feedback and praise from their community. Creating affordances like threaded question view windows where questions are primary entities in the UI can support mentors in swiftly replying to questions blocking students’ progress.
The analysis resulted in a research publication with practical implications for structuring e-mentoring experiences that meet program goals, and result in more satisfaction and engagement on the platform. For instance, creating opportunities for unstructured contact around project milestones, so students working on back end projects get the chance to receive feedback and praise from their community. Creating affordances like threaded question view windows where questions are primary entities in the UI can support mentors in swiftly replying to questions blocking students’ progress.