Abstract:

University has undergone several significant changes in teaching and learning process. Two important elements is necessary to mencioned. One, the adaptation of European Higher Education (ECTS), which not only led to an adaptation of curricula, also in all the process, from the entry of the new students', during all their learning process and also in the evaluative process.

Second element that has permeated university teaching process has been the introduction of new technologies, not only in academia, also in all personal and professional areas of each one of us. An example of this is to see how university students and even we "need" new technologies in order to make our teaching tasks.

Often, but, Society advances faster than regulation. For this reason, we could find several everyday situations with no regulations that could produce different answers and procedures in the same situation and, sometimes, these are based on the assumption of portagonists' rights and obligations.

University of the Balearic Islands has shown interest to regulate the process of tutoring students through their regulations, in special on "Full Oficial Universitari" (FOU). For example, 8879 (19 December 2008), which regulates teachers' dedication to the tutoring, or FOU 10959 (10 March 2014) which regulates tutoring program (art. 5) and opening hours (art. 22). Special mention to Tutorial Action Plan (PAT), which try to adapt tutoring process to ECTS.

However, we believe it is necessary to focuss our attention to tutorial online on higher education, because there is no specific regulation for this type on tutoring in PAT either in FOUs.

Principal objective is not to propose a regulation of virtual tutoring; we would like to reflect about strengths and weaknesses through state-of-art in order to make a general proposal and then, in the second phase, to include university teachers's and students' opinion through a interview in order to adapt the general information to our reality and make a protocol proposal.

Interviews are bases on sociodemographic information, time to he/she use virtual mentoring, principal reasons to use it, frequency , principal day and time to use, principal ways (telephon, email, virtual platforms, videoconferences,...), degree of agreement of virtual tutoring functions (Lorente, 2006): technic, academic, organizative, guidance, social ; level of satisfaction, motivation to use it, valorations about how it could help to learning process and opinion about a regulation of virtual tutoring. University teachers interviewed was selected on Education Faculty and with a higher experience on virtual tutoring, students selected was on Pedagogy, Teaching, Social Education and Psychology Degree of 3rd and 4rd year.

NOTE: This study is bases on "University Project Innovation"; so we now are not able to present our conclusions, but during this month we are closing interviews and for conference dates we will be able to present all the complete project.

Keywords:

Higher education, online tutoring, innovation projects.