Educação Profissional no Ensino Superior à Distância e o papel da tutoria para a formação humana

The growth of digital information and communication technologies has shown that various sectors of society have been benefited and have passed by changes with featured for Distance Education, which has evolved with each new technology, such as letter, radio, television, to the internet. Along with this path, it provided greater spatio-temporal reach and reduced the distance between students and teachers. With the internet and the possibility to attend an increasing numbers of students, for the composition of a distance learning course, new actors came on the scene, such as the case of the mediating professor, considered a presential and distance tutor. The tutoring has the function of guiding and monitoring the development of students, as well as assess learning, mediating the process between students and teachers. This study brings as a problematic justification the need to understand of what is tutoring in distance higher education, and aims to reflect on its performance for the human education of students. The research is bibliographic and documentary and uses as arguments and experiences derived from the tutoring process in its arguments, because seeks to discuss its contribution to the students' human formation. The considerations highlight that tutoring in distance education has a primary role for the learning of students in the human formation process, mainly in pedagogical training courses for unlicensed graduates.