Online mentoring is a computer-mediated, mutually beneficial relationship between a mentor and a protege that provides learning, advising, encouraging, promoting, and modeling. Online mentoring has been available since the advent of internet access and is evolving into a transformative educational and professional development strategy.

Online mentoring offers several advantages over traditional face-to-face mentoring, including:

1. Boundarylessness: Online mentoring transcends cultural, geographical, and physical barriers, enhancing inclusivity and fostering holistic development within an increasingly interconnected global community.
2. Egalitarianism: Online mentoring encourages belonging and engagement and provides new opportunities for self-directed learning.
3. Accessibility: Online mentoring advances a learning vision where mentorship transcends cultural, geographical, and physical barriers, enhances inclusivity, and fosters holistic development within an increasingly interconnected global community.
4. Flexibility: Online mentoring provides a dynamic platform that leverages digital connectivity to foster mentor-mentee relationships, drawing on online mentors' intentional use of strategies including personal competence, availability, career planning and networking, communication, feedback, and emotional connection.
5. Global reach: Online mentoring can help find global solutions to common challenges, develop a more diverse perspective, build global community and collaboration, especially where participants share common fields, and work together on international projects and programs.
6. Artificial intelligence-assisted online mentoring: AI methods may also impact online mentoring by managing administrative details, providing learner analytics to improve how the mentor guides the mentee, and helping to match mentors and mentees together.

However, there are also challenges to overcome in online mentoring, such as connectivity issues, access to reliable data, visual and auditory cues that facilitate effective interpersonal interactions, and the need for vigilant attention by both mentors and mentees to ensure up-to-date technology skills and coherent dialogue.

In conclusion, online mentoring is evolving into a transformative educational and professional development strategy that offers numerous advantages over traditional face-to-face mentoring. By creating collaborative learning experiences between mentees and mentors, online mentoring advances a learning vision where mentorship transcends cultural, geographical, and physical barriers, enhances inclusivity, and fosters holistic development within an increasingly interconnected global community.