STUDENTS’ EXPERIENCES ABOUT USING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INTO A MENTORING PROGRAMME IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The first year of university is a critical period both for the student and for the educational system itself. The university plays a key role in the changes experienced by the student on entering higher education and provides appropriate counselling activities aimed at reducing possible negative effects of such changes and at helping the student adapt to the transition.

At the outset of university studies, activities should be conducted, on the one hand to accompany and support new students through individualised tutoring plans, and on the other, to train them in the use of resources and services available to support learning, through group sessions.
One response to such needs has been the introduction of mentoring programmes (hereafter, MP) aimed at providing support to students to facilitate student learning and to provide guidance.

Previous studies have demonstrated the benefits that can be provided by mentoring, which in most cases takes the form of a face-to-face relationship between mentor and mentee. However, in recent years it has been necessary to seek alternatives to traditional models, not only to adapt to changing times, but also to cover the need for additional resources for mentoring. The e-mentoring model is steadily gaining acceptance as a replacement for the traditional approach.
This paper proposes a combination of the two methods, traditional (face-to-face) mentoring and e-mentoring, and in line with previous research, we propose a blended mentoring programme.

Various studies have examined the relationship between mentor and mentee, but few have focused on users’ assessments of the contents of these programmes, and fewer still on programmes developed to incorporate blended mentoring.

Acknowledging the importance and value of feedback from students in improving MP, the main goal of this paper is to determine the extent to which the implementation of Internet and information technology in a MP (via a blended mentoring model) may generate differences in students’ assessment of the programme activities. The value obtained from this research is that the findings obtained can serve as a resource to clarify the importance of educational interventions in the field of student guidance, to design new MP and to improve existing ones.

The MP described in this paper is provided to first-year students in the bachelor’s degree course in Business Administration at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Granada (Spain). From 2006/2007 to 2010/2011, at the end of each year, a survey was conducted of programme participants’ overall satisfaction with the mentoring and also with each of the activities carried out, in both individual and group mentoring sessions. The final sample was constituted of 272 valid survey returns. We conclude that the introduction of IT did not produce significant differences in evaluations of individual mentoring sessions, but that there were such differences with respect to some of the group mentoring sessions, namely those concerning International Relations and Educational & Psychological Counselling; in both cases, scores decreased when a blended mentoring programme was applied.