EMPATHIC COMMUNICATION IN E-LEARNING: ANALYSIS OF TUTOR-STUDENT INTERACTIONS

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the interactions over a semester between students of a Higher Education discipline in Pedagogy of a public consortium of Brazilian universities and the mentoring team. Having as main objective the analysis of the presence, or not, of the empathy between the interlocutors in question, we use both quantitative and qualitative methodology. From the analysis of the corpus, the messages from the "Tutoring Room", we sought to find out the most recurrent themes, as well as the presence of empathic communication in the interactions. Regarding the themes, 86.9% revolved around notes. This shows an excess of concern with the evaluation, more significant when we compare with interactions whose objective was to discuss some content of the classes - an index that represented only 1.4% of the conversations. As for the empathic nature of communication, we found some empathic trait in 52.2%. Of this group, 92.5% of the conversations were classified as negative empathic opportunities, in which the students showed some negative feelings. When we analyze the responses offered by the tutors, about 67% are classified as empathic terminators and only 15.3% of the answers were perceived as appropriate, in order to offer a return to the emotional demands demonstrated by the students.