The Role of E-tutors in Higher Education: A Case-Study Research Project

In recent years, e-tutors are playing an increasingly pivotal role in e-learning and online education, particularly following the changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic in distance education. Several theoretical studies have outlined the roles, functions, styles, and competencies of this important professional figure. Here we present the preliminary results of an ongoing research project conducted with the purpose to investigate the role and professional development of e-tutors of the IUL Telematic University community. This research uses a mixed method design to obtain better inferences by combining different data sources and to increase the validity of the findings. In this paper we present the results obtained from the questionnaire administered to a group of e-tutors (n. 57) to investigate several elements and dimensions: interests, educational and cultural background of the e-tutor; previous professional experiences, perceptions, and expectations about one’s role; disciplinary, methodological and socio-relational competencies; tutorship styles, practices and strategies. For the analysis, five dimensions of the questionnaire were considered to study tutoring methodologies and strategies: i) “teaching strategies”, ii) “teaching practices”, iii) “tools”, iv) “feedback”, v) and “evaluation”. Through an internal Spearman correlation analysis within the five dimensions, it emerged a positive correlation between the variables within each dimension. The individual items were then aggregated into five composite indicators, one for each section, and these indicators were used as dependent variables in a multiple linear regression analysis to examine the association between tutor skills and certain demographic and academic characteristics. The results are analysed and discussed.