Abstract:

We find ourselves in a context in which online learning is becoming more and more relevant due to the pandemic situation. This training model has gone from being an option to being the only possible option in environments where until now it had not even been considered, such as traditional universities and even basic or secondary schools. Professors and institutions have been forced to respond immediately to the problem. This situation made necessary to focus on environments where online training was already established to learn new methodologies, and processes. This is the case of continuous education programs.

Through a case study, six cases of continuous education programs in finance at the Universitat Politècnica de València were analyzed in order to explore the problems faced by students, the roles of tutors and their key competencies. We observed aspects such that students procrastinated at the beginning of the course, they did not realized the proposed methodology to apply until late in the course and claimed to have little time to complete the course. The tutors, in order to alleviate these difficulties, should focus their efforts on reorienting the students to reduce the dropout rate and increase the level of satisfaction of the participants. For this purpose they should apply a proactive tutoring model based on continuous accompaniment and personal guidance to the student.

This model is developed from four key moments:
(i) access to the e-learning platform,
(ii) progress in the course,
(iii) course evaluation and
(iv) final result. Facilitation, empathy and communication, raised as the key competencies of the tutor.

The second phase of the exploratory confirmatory design focuses on testing the hypothesis that the proactive tutoring model, resulting from the first phase of the qualitative research, improves learning outcomes in terms of number of successes as well as, increases student satisfaction. For this purpose, the results of the satisfaction surveys and the success rate of courses following a proactive tutoring model versus courses following a reactive tutoring model, are compared. The results obtained confirm that in courses where the proactive tutoring model was applied, the success rate is higher, as well as student satisfaction.

Keywords:

Tutoring, distance learning, continuous education, teaching quality.