Faculty Perceptions of E-Mentoring Doctoral Dissertations: Challenges, Strategies, and Institutional Support

ABSTRACT

Faculty members who e-mentor dissertations in online doctoral programs, or remotely as a result of COVID-19 participated in an open-ended survey about strategies that helped them succeed, challenges they faced, and institutional support they would find helpful. Consistent communication, individualized support, and structure were found helpful for e-mentoring dissertations. Faculty overwhelmingly cited time, workload, and lack of institutional support as challenges, and stated that institutions could help e-mentors by providing support with the process, research resources, writing support, and time and incentives for e-mentoring. The results are discussed with recommendations for institutional support for dissertation e-mentoring.

KEYWORDS:

• E-mentoring
• online supervision
• online mentoring
• virtual mentoring
• faculty strategies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical Review

This research was approved by the Institutional Review Boards at University of Florida and Texas A&M University.

Additional information

Funding

This work was not funded.