A Formação de Tutores E sua atuação na Educação a Distância: a realidade do curso de tecnologias assistivas, projetos e acessibilidade.

Abstract

The distance education is growing and professionals involved in the process need to empower themselves to follow the evolution of technology and teaching methodology. Among this professionals, there is a teacher-tutor whose role is to guide, encourage, motivate and build the student in their learning process. In this perspective, the present research entitled "The formation of tutors and their role in distance education", aimed to seek the understanding of two situations regarding mentoring. The first situation was to know how the course entitled "Formation of Tutors" prepares the participant to be the tutor, the second situation, was to research how was the performance of these tutors, mentors and mediators while in the course "Assistive Technology-4 ed." of Paulista State University, in partnership with the Open University of Brazil, in the modality of Distance Education. The research was defined according to the qualitative approach. Initially was realized a review of the literature authors which are: Freire, Perrenoud, Moran, Valente, Almeida, Morin, Kenski. Besides the bibliographic research, were conducted semi-structured interviews with four teachers and tutors that realized the course of formation and acted as tutors on the course "Assistive Technology", seeking to know their conceptions about: experience as a tutor, difficulties found in the course of formation, the contributions of ongoing formation for acting as tutor, and facilities and difficulties in acting tutor. Complementing the data collection, we used the analysis of the pedagogical material from both courses, as well as appreciation of the interaction and mediations occurred between trainer and teacher-tutors, tutors and teacher-course participants in forums, chats, calendars, diary of board and other tools of the Virtual Learning Environment (AVA) TelEduc. The analysis of the information and data obtained, allowed to identify that tutors were trained and prepared to meet adequate and effective the activities taught, mediate and guide the teacher-course participants. Regarding the categories of behavior of "being tutor" was noticed that identify problems, promote interaction and provide feedback were reported in the interactions between tutor-course participants on the records of forums and chats of the virtual environment of learning; as described in the precepts of Piaget, it was identified that tutors acted with autonomy over its operations in the course of Assistive Technology, and were encouraged by the trainers in the course of training to act with autonomy.