CONNECT-MENTOR: AN INTERACTIVE SOFTWARE FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT STUDENT– MENTOR COMMUNICATION IN PROJECT-BASED LEARNING

Mentorship is a form of academic or professionaldevelopment that has become a crucial part of academic progress,particularly as learning has grown to be more digitalized. Theproposed study is the Guidance Platform - Connecting Students withMentors, a digitized platform with structured design that is aimed atenhancing communication, increasing access to expert advice, andassisting students in their academic project. The current mentoringpractices tend to be unstructured, have unreliable communicationnetworks, and lack safe platform through which sensitive workinformation can be shared. The proposed platform will cover thesegaps with an integrated platform of verified mentor profiles, securedocument exchange channels, real-time communication features,and confidentiality tools, including NDAs and intellectual propertyprotection (watermark). The system has been built in a systematicmanner and it involved the following stages: requirement analysis,system and interface design, backend implementation and extensivetesting. In order to promote regular participation, the system usesgamification model of rewards which reward tokens, badges, andrankings on the leaderboard to mentors and students. Moreover, inbuilt analytics assist institutions to analyze the quality of mentoring,monitor the participation, and enhance support strategies. Thefindings indicate that a safe, structured online mentorship programhas the potential to enhance academic collaboration andaccountability of the mentor to a great extent. The possible futureexpansions are AI-based mentor suggestions, flawless integrationwith LMS, and the growth of cross-domain mentorship networks ata global level.