Improving Distance Mentoring: Challenges and How to Deal with them in Global Development Project Courses

In an attempt to provide real-world industrial experience, an increasing number of academic programs are broadening their portfolio to include global development projects. In these projects, the customer, the team or even the faculty are in different locations than those of their students creating a set of real world experiences and educational challenges. Various project elements such as asynchronous communications, remote assessment, and required knowledge transfer make effective learning challenging and problematic. To understand how to help faculty members overcome some of these challenges, faculty at Carnegie Mellon have studied recent and past projects specifically where clients, and/or faculty advisors were not co-located with their students. This paper presents some of their findings, provides recommendations and explains where specific attention is required for project and learning success.