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

poster abstractMentoring 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

Tutor Assisted Browser-based Learning Environment for Students

poster abstractTutor Assisted Browser-based Learning Environment for Students (TABLES) is a collaborative online synchronous learning center for math assistance. Our proposed project is intended to recreate a MATH tutor center which provides guidance and assistance to students on mathematics concepts. The TABLES project will provide online access in a collaborative learning environment (through a "table"), moderated by a tutor, who is expert in a particular subject domain. TABLES is built to help students and teachers interact in real-time, which affords them the opportunity for group learning which is critical in a math learning environment. A combination of tutor-based and peer assisted learning strategies help students consistently engage in the concepts and learn faster. Site Observations have provided us with several insights into this proposed design solution. TABLES must consist a student and tutor interface each of which must be specifically designed to re create the experience of a physical learning center. Through the help of queues, a virtual whiteboard and innovative chat sessions we intend to improve collaboration across the student population and facilitate a more holistic experience for all individuals involved. The virtual whiteboard is intended to provide a range of benefits such as cross collaboration across geographical locations which has been shown to improve learning outcomes. In conclusion this proposed project, TABLES has the potential to create a MATH repository for common problems and solutions that would eventually assist all new incoming students that join the learning center. By leveraging the advantages of online synchronous learning environments we propose to create a scalable, reliable and efficient learning environment which is able to connect a diverse variety of students with individual expert tutors. Acknowledgements. Mathematics Assistance Center [MAC] at IUPUI with the guidance of Dr. Kevin Berkopes who supports this research project work under the COMET lab

Mentoring Exchange

This poster describes the progress and lessons learned as a result of newly implemented Faculty Mentoring Program in the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing