A qualitative study examined the role of mentoring in the career paths of women deans and vice presidents in four-year public and private institutions of higher education. This study explored the impact of mentoring in assisting women to achieve their career objectives; the impact of a mentor's gender; the impact of having a mentor versus not having a mentor; and a description of mentoring by each participant. Participants were selected systematically via professional contacts of the researcher and the Higher Education Directory (2000). 15 women deans and vice presidents in four-year public and private institutions of higher education consented to participate in the study. An interview guide was used to create a consistent method of questioning yet questions were open-ended to allow for flexibility during the interview process. Ten of fifteen women participant's indicated they had received mentoring during their careers. Five women interviewed did not receive mentoring during their careers. Their career paths and levels of achievement were similar to the women who had female mentors.

Higher education in Germany traditionally follows a one-size-fits-all paradigm. The ignorance of diverse students’ needs jeopardizes high-quality and equal educational opportunities for all. Digital technologies can provide economical solutions to individualize teaching and learning, even in large university classes. However, their design has to incorporate pedagogical theories, specific contextual requirements, and users’ needs (Laurillard, 2008). In this project contribution, we want to demonstrate our approach to this challenge. We briefly describe how we connected the pedagogical concept of mentoring to theories of self-regulated learning and used this as a framework for developing formative assessment and automated feedback tools as digital mentoring interventions. The mentoring nterventions aim at facilitating self-regulated learning, especially self-monitoring and strategy-adaption. We present three different implementations in structured and illstructured domains and the key results of a qualitative evaluation survey. [Aus: Introduction]