IUPUI Faculty Mentoring Exchange: A Platform to Seek and Volunteer Mentoring

Abstract

Mentoring combines the impact of learning with the human need for social connection; it helps individuals achieve their best potential in a competitive and challenging world. Within educational organizations, people are willing to seek advice on various topics, including teaching, research, service, civic engagement, and mutual concerns. The IUPUI Faculty Mentoring Exchange is an application, which allows, faculty to seek mentoring, or offer to mentor to those who could benefit from their insights, expertise, and experience. The Mentoring Exchange delivers three core functionalities: 1.) Voluntary mentoring, 2.) A way to seek to mentor, and 3.) Establishing a social connection chain among the faculty from diverse departments and locations. Participating in the Mentoring Exchange is entirely voluntary. Users fill out a checklist to describe the types of insights and experience they wish to discuss with a colleague. The Mentoring Exchange will then offer a list of potential mentors who have described themselves as having such insights to offer. Then, it is up to the user to contact any of these colleagues and take it from there. Human-centered design processes were followed to deliver the system: user research, prototyping, implementation and iterative analysis. After observations and contextual inquiry, data was collected for sketching and prototyping. We learned about the types of mentoring faculty wish to seek out. Senior faculties were asked about their willingness to provide mentoring. Currently, we are evaluating what users are searching for with an ongoing collection of data. Next, we plan build intelligent social matchmaking ecosystem using machinelearning algorithm. Our work contributes to the enhancing of mentoring culture and creating social connections within the organization.