Mentoring Distance-Based Graduate Students: The Role of Academic Advisors
Abstract
Distance education continues to be a hot topic in higher education. This study examined the perceptions of distance-based graduate students at one university to help determine whether professional academic advisors are perceived to serve as mentors. Distance-based students were contacted to determine their perceptions of mentoring in relation to professional academic advisors using an online survey adapted from the Mentor Role Inventory. In the area of graduate education, mentoring is primarily conducted by faculty; however, evidence in this study shows professional academic advisors can help supplement mentoring as it relates to distance-based graduate students, but cannot replace faculty. Traditional academic advisors generally are not understood to be serving in a mentorship role for distance-based graduate students, and while this study does not entirely dispel this assumption, it does reveal that academic advisors do meaningfully contribute to the overall mentoring process. Academic advisors not only serve a different role and function from faculty for distance-based graduate students, but can also serve as supplemental mentors. Advisors are well situated to meet some of the needs within a mentoring relationship with distance students by consistently and actively engaging this population to meet student needs. This study shows that the academic advisors cannot replace the mentoring provided by faculty, but still play a valuable role for graduate students.
The findings underscore the importance of ongoing social interaction throughout the socialization and research process graduate students undertake, and professional academic advisors can help close some of the gap. While graduate programs in online education continue to grow and consist of larger components of online and blended delivery components, these findings reveal that distance graduate programs need to be more intentionally designed so the graduate student experience includes a variety of social interactions and increasing their access to faculty, academic advisors, and other campus resources. This study does not solve the conundrum of mentoring distance-based graduate students or prove that academic advisors can replace faculty in reference to mentoring, but it shows that it is important to intentionally improve students’ access to an active learning community and attention paid to distance-based graduate students.
Citation
Arnold III, Felix Wallace (2019). Mentoring Distance-Based Graduate Students: The Role of Academic Advisors. Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /186343.