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Summary: ANYTIME-ANYWHERE STUDENT SUPPORT THROUGH
VIRTUAL MENTORS
J. C. Augusto, P. McCullagh, A. McRoberts, V. McNair
University of Ulster
Jordanstown campus, UK
{jc.augusto, pj.mccullagh, a.mcroberts, v.mcnair }@ulster.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
Higher Education institutions in the UK rely on mentoring programs as one of the ways to support students at
different stages of their training. The reality is that, good as this resource could be, it is not available to
students all the time. Students can contact their advisers, and support resources like Career Development
Centres, at scheduled times, but sometimes the problems motivating the students to seek advice may require
an immediate answer. Anytime-anywhere student support is an emerging area of development as indicated by
its inclusion in a range of University policies. This article proposes a holistic approach which blends emerging
technologies into a `Virtual Mentor'. This paper provides the motivation for our work, technical details of the
software system, and initial validation exercises.
Keywords
Student support, virtual, mentoring, avatar front-end
1. INTRODUCTION
Higher Education institutions in the UK rely on mentoring programs as one of the ways to support students at
different stages of their training. This advice provides students with orientation on how to develop their talents
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