ABS090 - Mediational tools from practices of tutors acting as research supervisors in online education

Supervisor’s role and function represent an increasing field of interest and study, especially due to their substantial responsibility in the development of research. However, little is known about how supervisors develop their work and how they could have been trained or assisted to improve their supervisional practices from a theoretical point of view. The aim of this study was to identify and analyse the mediational tools adopted by tutors in a supervision activity system (SAS) from online education. We present a systematic and quantitative analysis of a complete questionnaire, containing 11 questions answered by 27 tutors, after one year of supervision activity. To produce a quantitative and qualitative analysis we created 16 categories pointing to mediational tools, which lead to a total of 393 references in the entire data. The mediational tools in this SAS allowed us to identify some tensions and contradictions: 1) writing was a tension between tutors and students but also served as a register of the supervision process and a way to promote writing during the entire process of supervision; 2) the collective orientation proposed by the course coordination was successful in creating a community of practice for the tutors but wasn’t effective in the group of students from each supervisor. Based on this analysis and the tutor’s words, these tensions may represent possibilities of expansion to the SAS from the online to the onsite context.