Florida Atlantic University (FAU) is the recipient of a grant to fund a new, comprehensive mentoring program called “The Mentoring Project,” designed to assist with improving student success outcomes through creating “Connections” a structured mentoring program for first year freshmen and transfer students. The three year grant will establish The Mentoring Project in order to help students reach their full potential and complete college by connecting them to compassionate and trained peer, faculty and staff mentors. Mentoring will be integrated into our holistic student success framework to support the overall institutional commitment to retaining and graduating students. The project is a collaboration between the Divisions of Academic Affairs and Student Affairs.
The Mentoring Project far exceeded its initial goal of recruiting its first cohort of 50 faculty/staff mentors and 100 mentees. We did not envision that 187 faculty and staff would volunteer to serve as mentors. The enthusiastic response continued among 464 first year freshmen who requested a mentor. The commitment to offer a new university wide approach to mentoring is clearly a priority throughout the university.
The Mentoring Project requests funding for 10 iPads - Air 2, iPad - Air 2 smart cases and three year Apple Care service in order to provide interactive learning opportunities for FAU students through in-house professional development training for peer mentors, mentoring outreach programs, recruitment at campus wide events and to capture learning outcome assessments at mentoring programs from student mentees.
The Mentoring Project hosted over 50 student SLS classes this past fall semester with over 1,000 freshmen students who were invited to submit their online profiles for “Connections.” The use of iPads would better enable staff to provide information via our website and instruction for mentee registration. The SLS class visits and mentoring workshops are delivered through brief lecture format and instructor demonstrations. With the introduction of iPads into mentoring workshops and outreach programs, staff can move beyond static presentations and deliver interactive, dynamic hands-on learning approaches to effectively engage students to become active participants in The Mentoring Project.
During orientations, students would create online profiles to register as mentees in “Connections.” Students would access interactive tools and resources on our website to set goals and learn how to maximize their mentoring relationship during guided workshop presentations. Integrating the use of iPads into our workshops would effectively engage students in the learning process. In addition, during mentoring events, iPads would provide an immediate tool to capture student learning outcomes. This process would replace our time intensive paper-based surveys and would provide real-time data.
One of the goals of The Mentoring Project is to deliver mentoring education and outreach programs in a state-of-the-art learning environment that fosters active learning in our students so that they become active participants in connecting to campus, academic resources and engage in high impact practices such as academic service learning and internships. As our students are tech savvy they would embrace the use of this technology and its application to engage with the campus using the same electronic tools they are using to communicate, learn about and receive information in the digital age. The new iPads will directly enrich instructional technology resources for students by allowing them enhanced access to online tools. This will enable The Mentoring Project to more effectively deliver education and peer training programs to students.
This proposal is aligned with FAU’s Strategic Plan in several respects. The Strategic Plan emphasizes, “Increase enrollment in Board of Governors’ areas of strategic emphasis”. Year one of the grant targets students majoring in the STEM fields to participate in the “Connections” mentoring program. The Strategic Plan also states: “Develop an academic support structure for timely student graduation: Improve undergraduate student retention and graduation rates.”
The Mentoring Project was developed as an intentional solution to help stem the attrition of first year freshmen in support of the Board of Governors Metrics, specifically the academic progress rate and the six year graduation rate. By helping new first year freshmen make an immediate connection to FAU through a faculty, staff or peer mentor, students are more likely to persist in school and graduate.
