Online tutor dialogic feedback in forums of teacher training

Discussion forums are a strategic activity in online tutored teacher training. In them, online tutor (man or woman) is the key agent to develop feedback and formative assessment of "learning in dialogue". This article analyzes the discursive performance of the tutor in forums of different subjects of an online degree for teachers in service of elementary schools in Mexico. From a total corpus of 23 tutors in four subjects of this program, three cases which provided systematic and personalized feedback were selected. From the in-depth analysis of these messages in the forum, three types of feedback were identified: critical, interactional, and curricular. The results show that the tutors' discourse expands the pedagogical potential of the forums, although they are not paradigmatic examples of the dialogic learning model. It is concluded that there are three barriers to online dialogic tutoring and, therefore, to feedback for formative assessment. One is the courtesy between teachers, which inhibits the cognitive potential for discussion; the second is the increasing standardization and automation of learning in virtual environments. Finally, the third barrier is the instructional design itself, which limits the conversational agenda between teachers. The article discusses the implications of this knowledge for the construction of dialogic feedback and formative evaluation in digital environments.