Tuesdays with an Open and Distance Learning mentor

Abstract

Tuesdays with Morrie is a 1997 non-fictional book by an American writer, Mitch Albom, which was later made into a film with the same title. It tells the true story of sociologist Morrie Schwartz and his relationship with Mitch Albom as his protégé. When the professor is diagnosed with a terminal disease, Mitch begins to visit him at home and soon realises that although he has grown remarkably since he was at university, he still has a lot to learn about life. Students in an open and distance learning environment usually reside far away from the institution and often feel alienated when starting with the higher education learning process. For this article, the authors conducted an empirical research on e-mentorship in general and revisited the institutional tutor model on why students fail repeatedly. Furthermore, by observing mentor relationships an action plan is proposed for an e-mentor relationship in order to establish if such a relationship could be built on Johnson and Aragon's Framework for Online Learning Environments; what it should look like, how it should be contracted and which principles come into play in this endeavour. This article is reworked by the authors from the conference proceedings with the same title that was published on www.interdiscipinary.net in 2011.