This short FAQ answers frequently asked questions about participating in the Mentors Circle and provides helpful tips for accessing discussion forums and other community resources.
Mentors are volunteers, not employees. They are not required to be online at a certain time or to perform any specific tasks. Each mentor decides how much time he or she wishes to devote to their forum. Involvement can be minimal, such as answering occasional questions from users; or a mentor can be more involved, providing feedback, sharing useful links, even their own tutorials from time to time.
Whenever possible, we will assign several mentors to each forum. That way, if you are offline or unable to answer a user's question, someone else will be able to respond.
To join the Mentors Circle, you don't need a college degree but you must be well-versed on your chosen subject and be able to provide accurate and lucid answers to users' questions. Your expertise can come from on-the-job training, academic courses, or life experience.
To find out whether we have a forum that fits your qualifications, review our list of forums and follow the instructions on that page to submit an application. If none of our current forums interest you, please send us an email listing the topic(s) that you would like to mentor and we will let you know when an opening occurs.
Some forums are linked to online classrooms. Students may use these forums to discuss course materials and post homework projects. You are not expected to write lessons, although you are welcome to suggest additions or revisions to the course if you wish. Likewise, you are not expected to grade homework, although any feedback that you offer will give students useful insights and will be greatly appreciated.
If you are mentoring a classroom forum, a link to that course will display on your Web Desk before the start date. You can use this link to view course materials. If you are unable to reach your Web Desk or if a forum link does not work as it should, please let us know.
Remember that all forms of spam (advertising, etc.) are prohibited on forum boards. Mentors may not solicit forum users, collect users' email addresses for mailing lists or other purposes, or advertise any products, services, or websites unless approved by us in advance.
Forums can be accessed 24/7 by logging in to your Web Desk If a forum that you are mentoring is linked to an online classroom, you should find convenient links to both the discussion board and the classroom on your desk. If a link does not appear as expected, please let us know.
All forums now support "message echoing" which means that a copy of each comment posted on the forum board is instantly emailed to you. In forums with more than one mentor, a copy is sent to each person. This saves you the time and effort of having to log in and search through a large number of comments that you have already viewed. Mentors typically like this feature because it saves time; however, if you prefer not to receive echoed messages, contact us and ask that message echoing be disabled.
When an echoed message arrives in your Inbox, you will notice several handy links at the top of the message.
When replying to an echoed message, remember that you must click the 'Reply to Message' link, as described above. This will open a new browser window where you can compose your message. Do not use your email program's 'Reply' command!
Occasionally, you may want to post a forum announcement that will display in a highlighted color and thus be more readily noticed by forum reader. To post an announcement, type three exclamation points at the beginning of the Subject field, and then type your message subject. For example:
!!!IMPORTANT, Everyone Please Read
The three exclamation points will be filtered out when the message is processed by the server, and the subject will be highlighted.
We are continually developing and fine-tuning our forum discussion boards. To suggest a new feature or other improvement, please contact us.