Hi Brian, Thanks so much for watching our video and for your question.  MentorNet was established in 1997 and in the early-years much was published in the literature on both short term and long term impacts.  The focus was originally on women students and then shifted to women and students of color.  MentorNet now serves all students with a focus on those who are women, students of color, and under-served.

In 2014, MentorNet implemented a major redesign of its service and since that time the research has been done on a project by project basis, and has focused on that communities unique utilization of the platform for their community.  MentorNet itself has focused on user satisfaction with its end of mentorship survey (for both mentors and mentees), and is currently in the process of implementing a standardized approach to measure impact across the entire platform which will have IRB approval so that results can be published.  

Hi Danielle, the response is largely the same as to Brian's.  The structure for longitudinal analysis was not built into the original service, and was larger done back then by external studies.  With more recent upgrades to the service, we will be able to more easily track educational and career progress of participants, as well as levels of engagement.  I appreciate your question about whether our mentors were prior MentorNet mentees.  This question can be easily added either as a profile question moving forward.  Thank you for the suggestion.

Hi Whitney,  Thanks for your question.  MentorNet is a guided virtual mentoring experience.  Mentoring pairs receive discussion prompts from MentorNet on a weekly basis, and the topics focus on topics of importance for academic success and persistence and are appropriate for the student's developmental level.  When MentorNet is used for a community or project, content and frequency can be adjusted and aligned to meet the needs of the project.  

Hi Jay,  Thank you for your question.  I posted a response related to the longitudinal data above.  The service is very different today from the way it was originally designed so it would not be appropriate to link prior results to the current service.  

MentorNet does not currently seek to create geographic matches, and we have debated through time whether we should do so.  We have partner communities that do include geographic questions for their sub-community.  In these cases, this information is used for match recommendations, but we are not doing this for the overall community.  We are in the process of implementing feature updates that will provide on-platform resources to make the virtual interaction experience feel more like a face-to-face experience.   

Hi Sylvia,  Thank you so much for the feedback!  We also have a subcommunity that is using the service for near-peer mentoring.

Hi Sylvia, yes, I agree that there is definitely synergy between the two approaches, and had the same thought when we recently discussed approaches to support faculty via INCLUDES.

Thanks Lorena!