The Experience of Mentoring Students Online: An Evaluation of the Transition from Face-to-face to Online peer mentoring

Peer mentoring has long been employed as a method of facilitating the learning process with peer mentors or learning facilitators as also described in this paper, serving as an alternative to faculty teachers. However, there is dearth of qualitative studies exploring the experiences of learning facilitators teaching or mentoring (the two terms will be used interchangeably) in an online environment. The aim of this study is to examine how undergraduate students at the largest college in Greece experienced and evaluated their roles as learning facilitators and to what extent their role was hindered or enhanced in a virtual setting. I conducted semi-structured interviews with learning facilitators who have experienced both online and face-to-face peer mentoring. Upon the transcription of the interviews verbatim, I performed qualitative thematic analysis. The results revealed that all peer mentors prefer face-to-face mentoring to e-mentoring and unanimously believe that online mentoring cannot replicate the practices of face-to-face peer mentoring. Keywords: mentoring, online, higher education, impact