I used undergraduate peer mentors in my intermediate microeconomics class in the late 1990s.  Their function was mainly to staff online office hours, held in the evening.  After a couple of iterations of this we then started to also have face to face office hours staffed by these same peer mentors, because some students said they wanted them. In this way we avoided complaints, though the online office hours were much more heavily utilized.

The bulk of discussion during office hours concerned homework problems and how to work them.  I had given the peer mentors solutions to the problems that had been assigned from the textbook.  These were solutions I had written up.  I gave the mentors instructions to not give the solutions to the students but rather to help them think through how to work the problems.  The first time I used peer mentors that was it for their training.  They learned to be a peer mentor by doing it, adjusting the approach based on how it had gone before.  There was a technical issue about whether to use the discussion board or the text chat.  I believe they ultimately ended up preferring the text chat and then copying that when the chat was over and pasting into the discussion board so other students could review it. On how to respond to a particular question from a student, the peer mentors figured that out on their own.

As I recruited peer mentors from students who had taken the class and done reasonably well in it, in subsequent iterations of the course the mentors may very well have participated in one or more of those chats as a student and/or they may have read chats posted to the discussion board. So they brought with them that experience as students.  In addition to what I described above, we would also do a lunch before the start of the semester, so the new peer mentors could meet the ones who returned from the last time and so their received wisdom could be shared with the group.

For the most part that preparation proved sufficient.  The TAs also had the added security blanket that they could chat with me online if they got stuck.  I was available much of the time.  I don’t recall that happening much, but all of this is now a distant memory.  I do recall a couple of issues for which the preparation I provided was inadequate. One example happened to an African-American peer mentor when she was helping a student who got frustrated and made some racist remarks.  The incident caused me to get flustered.  I didn’t have the expertise how to manage it well.  So I clearly couldn’t have prepared the mentors to handle such situations should they arise.  But it does suggest to me that mentors would benefit from some training on how to respond to angry students.

In using peer mentors in other courses, instructors may very well want the mentors to do many other things beyond conducting office hours and/or even in office hour mode the topics of discussion might be much more varied than they were in my class.  The mentors must then be prepared, both content-wise and playing-their-role-wise.

One approach for doing this, particularly for gaining competence in the latter, is for the student to take a course where developing such competence is the focus and then viewing the peer mentoring activity as the practicum that is associated with this course.  Quite conceivably, this course would be taught by one instructor while the student would serve as peer mentor in a course taught by a different instructor, possibly in a different department. This second instructor would have responsibility to prepare the peer mentor content-wise, but certainly would also have a strong interest that the playing-their-role course was preparing their peer mentor in a suitable way.

Now lets envision that there are several different subject matter courses that utilize peer mentors where each relies on the same playing-their-role course.  The only way that would work in an effective manner is for a community to form among these instructors, and then where some general agreement emerges as to how the playing-their-role course should be structured.

Thus a systematic approach to peer mentoring seems to imply a need for a community based in developing any playing-their-role course.  It may then be that disciplinary affinity suggests having multiple distinct communities with a different playing-their-role course for each separate community.  In other words, peer mentors in humanities courses might take a different playing-their role course than peer mentors in engineering take.

Whether one community that spans the entire campus can work is an open question that we should not try to answer a priori.  It is a question this project will aim to address.

Let me talk briefly about the economics of in kind payments as compensation versus cash payments as compensation.  On the one hand, if cash is scarce and the in kind form of payment is comparatively abundant, then it is cheaper to use the in kind payment.  So, for example, one of my students from last fall wrote in her extra credit project that at many restaurants a particular job perq is “free meals” for staff.  Likewise, the airlines tend to compensate (for example when looking for volunteers to take a later flight in an overbooking situation) by giving travel vouchers good for future flights.

On the other hand, students should receive course credit from a substantive educational activity, but not for work where there is little if any learning for them.  For such work, students really should be paid in cash.  Paying them with course credit in this case amounts to depreciating the value of the credit.  That may not be noticeable if done rarely.  But if done in the large it will ultimately depreciate the value of the degree.  This line of thought implies a need to get some measure of the educational value for being a mentor.  That is part and parcel of the project.

Turning to the demand side, there are two ways to think of course credit as compensation.  One is most relevant for students who have a substantial number of free electives available for their major, some of which might be filled by getting course credit for peer mentoring.  Considered this way, with enough such credit a student might be able to graduate a semester earlier.  This would mean a semester less of tuition and a semester more of alternative paid work which is not available to a full time student.  This is where the in kind form of compensation translates into cash.  The translation is lumpy, however.  One course of credit this way likely won’t speed up graduation.  Several might.

The other way to consider compensation for mentoring is as a credential to be added to the student’s resume.  This credential value should be present irrespective of whether the student is paid with course credit or with cash.  It is doing the activity that matters, as long as it can be verified that the mentor performed the mentoring duties in a satisfactory matter.  (Here course credit might be better than cash, because if the mentoring were unsatisfactory the student wouldn’t get the course credit.)  At issue then is how valuable the mentoring credential proves to be.

I don’t have any direct knowledge of this now.  But I do have a recollection of when I used peer tutors in teaching intermediate microeconomics back in the late 1990s.  Several of my mentors told me they talked about the mentoring in job interviews and it helped them with job placement.  The people interviewing them were apparently impressed that they had this experience.  (Back then, most of the mentoring was via online office hours.  It was pretty early in the development of the Internet for doing such things.  So there was a novelty factor at play.)   One might expect that such mentoring would still be perceived as valuable, even if the technology use is completely ordinary, because mentoring suggests a certain type of people skill and somebody who can mentor well likely would be good at interacting with customers or be a good manager.

My early thinking on the course credit or cash alternative is that first time mentors probably learn quite a lot from the activity so it is worthy of course credit, while those who are doing for a second time or beyond may not learn quite as much.  The more experienced mentors, then, probably should be paid.  Cash is very scarce on campus now, as we are facing pending very large budget cuts.  If everything else here makes sense the implication is to limit mentoring multiple times or find some new revenue source that can enable it.  I’d much rather that the latter happens, but how to identify donors for the activity is not something I can speak to, though I did write about something similar on my blog many years ago.