The UK’s largest educational online mentoring project is currently being pioneered by The Brightside Trust, paving the way for what promises to be an exciting and useful communication and learning tool...

By Nancy Campbell

The Brightside Trust has been awarded nearly half a million pounds from Aimhigher to provide a quality e-mentoring website to universities across the country. The goal of the scheme is to improve access to medicine and healthcare courses for under-privileged young people. At its heart, is an innovative private blogging system, via which undergraduates can mentor state school pupils.

The Bright Journals project is part of a wider interest in the educational possibilities e-mentoring promises. Gordon Brown spoke warmly of e-mentoring in a speech to the volunteering conference in January, and there is an ongoing media buzz around St Ambrose, the college in Cheshire, which allows pupils to email their homework.

So, it looks like e-mentoring is set to be one of this year’s hot topics, but how does it work in practice?

My blog support system

There are no hard and fast rules for what constitutes e-mentoring: coaching and advice can be provided through email exchanges or using a less intimate online forum. Both of these have their problems, especially in the context of education, where child protection is a priority.

Forums are simply too large and informal to provide effective mentoring. While it could be argued that popular diet forums on sites such as Weight Watchers offer constant advice, support and coaching, the environment is too unstructured and open to be reproduced successfully for education purposes.

Email has the advantage of being private, allowing for focused, personal advice in a constructive mentoring relationship. However, it is impossible to monitor: you can’t check whether the mentoring is working effectively, or make sure that the relationship hasn’t got out of hand.

Bright Journals, in partnership with web design agency, the OTHER media, has therefore been designed around a different model, based on blogging. Each person has a private online journal that only they and their mentoring partner can access. Here they have the opportunities to write more reflective entries on how their studies are going, or ask direct questions. As well as writing in their own journals, they can also see and comment on their partners’.

The only other people to see these journals are university coordinators, who can monitor the process and check for any inappropriate behaviour. This combination of privacy and security creates a comfortable space for mentors and mentees to communicate.

Jonathan Briggs, Professor of New Media Design at Kingston University and Director of the OTHER media, said:

“This is an exciting project to work on. It’s great to take an over hyped technology like blogging and use it as an effective tool to support educational mentoring”.

Near-to-peer mentoring

The idea behind this kind of mentoring project is to combat exclusion through friendship and informal learning. Mentees are often the first person in their family to go to university: they may want to know what it’s like being a student or have practical questions on their studies or application form, which the people around them might not be able to help out with.

Mentors are only a couple of years older than their mentees, so they are in a good position to empathise and give useful advice. The idea is to demystify university life for the mentee, so they can see higher education through the eyes of someone who is almost their peer.

This concept isn’t a new one: many universities have some kind of face-to-face mentoring scheme as part of their widening participation activities. Medical schools have a particularly strong history of encouraging mentoring, both externally and between medic students. E-mentoring mainly works to increase the ease and frequency of communication in a mentoring relationship, though in some cases it does stand alone.

A space to break through barriers

In her speech to BETT, the annual educational technology show, Education Secretary, Ruth Kelly said:

“I want every child, every young person, every learner, wherever they are, to achieve their full potential. ICT has an important place in making that possible. By aiding teaching and learning. By opening up new ways to learn and new places to learn in. By extending choice. By allowing greater tailoring to the individual.”

This weblogging form of e-mentoring between ‘nearly peers’ shows that ICT is fulfilling some of its promise. A welcoming and secure online environment is a great place to start breaking down a few of the social barriers some young people face when contemplating higher education.

The target for The Brightside Trust is to get 50 higher education institutions using the site and to have established 5000 mentoring relationships by the end of 2006. With the prospect of top up fees coming in, universities need to prove that they are encouraging widening participation: e-mentoring is one way they can effectively commit to helping young people achieve their potential and get a degree.

About the Author:

Nancy Campbell is Web Editor of Bright Journals, The Brightside Trust’s e-mentoring website. The Brightside Trust is an innovative charity founded in 2003 by entrepreneurs, largely from the pharmaceutical sector, who came together to help young people achieve their goal of getting into higher education to study health sciences. As well as managing this e-mentoring scheme, Brightside also gives direct grants to other widening participation projects.

Related Events:

NMK plans to hold a public event on the impact of e-learning and ICT in education in the summer of 2005. This event would be of interest both to content producers in this area, and educationalists. Please check back on this website for more announcements.