El Pla de Tutoria a la Universitat

Interest in tutoring for university students has increased in recent years due to changes in teaching that derive, among other causes, from the construction of the European Higher Education Area. Thus, some degrees, faculties and universities have begun to develop guidance and tutoring activities, complementary to academic tutoring, with the aim of facilitating students’ transition from secondary school to university, reducing possible learning difficulties and guiding them towards entering the labour market. Activities such as personalized tutoring, peer tutoring, research, practical or virtual tutoring are some of the modalities currently offered and on which there is a need to delve deeper into the role of the teacher and the student, the content of the tutoring, the support materials, etc. In the Spanish context, there are notable experiences regarding tutoring and guidance, however they tend to appear as isolated actions, carried out by different people in charge, disconnected from each other, when a plan that brought them together would considerably solve problems of resources, coordination, information, etc. This book is intended to offer organizational indications on how to coherently group the various tutorial actions of a degree, faculty or university in a Tutoring Plan.
The book deals mainly with the elements of a Tutoring Plan: the detection of needs, the writing of objectives, the main types of tutorial action (depending on the modalities, agents, format or scope of the plan), the key moments for the attention of students, the organization and its evaluation. It also presents the characteristics that the process of implementing a plan must have and ends with a set of strategies, instruments and bibliographical references that contribute to knowing how the tutorial action is organized in practice in higher education institutions.
The publication presents the results of a project carried out by the UAB University Tutoring research group. It was produced within the framework of a call for Teaching Quality Improvement Projects and is entitled Approach and orientation of tutoring at the UAB: framework and support for its development. Analysis of personalized tutoring in the Veterinary degree and preparation of improvement proposals (DURSI, 2002). The group, made up of teachers from different academic fields, has been operating since 2001.
It is a publication from the ‘Eines’ collection that the IDES (Teaching Innovation in Higher Education) unit of the UAB makes available to those teachers interested in designing or optimizing tutoring at the university.