CEP812 : Wicked Problem Project: Part A - Description of Need or Opportunity

After watching the movie, Waiting for Superman, one thing that I gathered is that there is a demand for people to give back to the education system however best they can. This helped form my Wicked Problem, and i feel that an important educational need is that students should have constant  motivation and understanding of the importance to obtain a college degree. 

I will use Internet mentoring to address this problem,  through the access to college students of different backgrounds and paths. Those that are currently successfully navigating through college and those that have came across some trials and tribulations that may have effected their college success. I personally can give a personal testimony of how horrible I did as an undergrad compared to the dramatic changes that were necessary to maneuver through graduate school. And if anything that can be enhanced through technology can definitely be mentoring. 

This approach will be reasonable due to the use of free internet video messaging tools, such as skype, oovoo, and possibly google video chat, and possible help aids will be used such as vyew, jing, ppt, and other resources.  These Internet Mentors will be implemented in high schools, with adult supervision.  The idea is to run for one school year, and depending on the need, longer. High school students will use it, and make contact with college students. The start off test sample would be high school juniors, to follow their progress overall until they graduate.

Some of the results that I came across involve Internet Mentoring or Telementoring. I found a couple of articles on Proquest that greatly helped, one in-particular was about Virtual mentors: Mentoring on the Internet. This broke down, what a virtual mentor is, some advantages, disadvantages, and directions for implementation. Aside from Proquest, I search on Google Scholar, and later will just do a general Internet search.

My plan for this course is to be able to conduct a survey of the college mentors. This will be a type of screening to ensure, we are gathering qualified mentors based on the qualifications set forth by the myself.  After this this there will be background checks to make sure that the mentors have no current criminal and sexual history. After that, a sample of students and schools will be selected to partake in the plot program. 

Success will be measured comparing the preliminary and post focus groups and survey responses of the students, as well as focus groups, progress reports, and surveys from the teachers of the students. this way we will have identified any changes in the students academic, social, emotional, willing and readiness to matriculate to the collegiate level.