La recherche sur l’encadrement à distance en enseignement supérieur

The overall goal of our project consists of the literature review on tutoring and learning support in distance higher education, published in French and English. In this paper, we describe the first step of this project, accomplished for three following objectives : (1) constitute an open documentary database on tutoring and learning support of distance learners ; (2) analyze the concepts of distance learner support and learning support in French-speaking and English-speaking perspectives ; (3) present an overall view of the publications contained in the database. The hermeneutic methodology of the literature review process (Boell & Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2014), allowed us to clarify the notion of learner/learning support in both perspectives and to focus the literature review on the subject of learning support/ tutoring in distance programs and courses. The database, available for free access on the web, includes 486 publications on this subject. The results present an overview of the research in both French-speaking and English-speaking perspectives and its evolution between 1974 and 2016, taking into account the organizational and institutional context of distance courses and programs (distance-teaching university vs. on-campus teaching university).