e-mentoring Activities in Online Programming Communities: An Empirical Study on Stack Overflow

Abstract

Mentoring is widely acknowledged as an effective method for professional and academic development. The advances in the area of Information Technologies (IT) have positively impacted the mentoring process through a more technology-mediated form of mentoring known as e-mentoring or online mentoring. This form of mentoring has particularly had a great impact in improving learning opportunities in the context of online communities where mentors and mentees from around the world interact with each other in a mutually beneficial collaboration and learning experience. In this paper, we focus on online programming communities and we aim at identifying and understanding e-mentoring activities carried out in this context. We performed a qualitative study on a sample of 400 Q&A threads (i.e., questions and their corresponding answers) from Stack Overflow and identified a total of 31 different activities organized into 10 categories of activities. The results of our study provide insights into the e-mentoring activities performed in Stack Overflow, which can benefit both researchers and practitioners interested in understanding and improving e-mentoring in similar contexts.