DL-TUTOR: uma ferramenta de apoio à gestão da atividade da tutoria em sistemas de educação a distância

Abstract

It is possible to observe that the current scenario of distance education in Brazilian Higher Education Institutions has shown an increase in demand for Distance Learning Courses. The Ministry of Education said this increase was about fifteen per cent of enrollments made in higher level courses (MEC 2013). This clearly points to an expansion of school systems in offering distance mode courses. To be able to meet and adapt to this new level of complexity it is necessary to adapt the systems to have academics and virtual learning environments that allow teachers and students to benefit from the new facilities offered by these environments. It appears, however, that academic management systems and learning management environments available do not meet the actual needs of the administrative and pedagogical coordinators and teachers of DL courses. In addition, new roles have been created such as the role of the Tutor. The central focus of this study is to investigate the real difficulties encountered by teachers and coordinators of distance courses in the management of the activities of tutors; to establish the functionalities of the system designed to query the data from the activities of tutors in this environment of teaching and learning; and to provide elements to assist and streamline the practice of coordinators and teachers in managing the activities of the tutors in the virtual rooms. In order to make this possible, functional requirements were settled, a review of Moodle s functionalities was performed and a web application was implemented. The final result is an application called DL-TUTOR.