As the traditional division between course development and learning support gradually blurs in collaborative online learning environments, new requirements for the roles and competencies of tutors have emerged. They are now asked to play a larger part in the design and delivery of the courses, as well as in assessing students. This new approach has been widely used in Portugal, since the Universidade Aberta (UAb), the Portuguese open university, has implemented its virtual pedagogical model, in 2007. However, there is no legal provision for the pedagogical role of online tutors in the country. The Portuguese Government's recent draft proposal for the Legal Framework for Higher Distance Education (Regime Jurídico do Ensino Superior a Distância - RJED), submitted to public discussion in the Spring of 2019, surprisingly fails to solve this problem. The RJED applies a traditional approach to distance education in which tutoring plays just a peripheral role. Tutors are not part of the teaching staff as such and it is not foreseen that they may assess students. Representing a risk to the more advanced tutoring models already being used by Portuguese Higher Education institutions, this regulation has generated significant criticism. In this paper, the authors analyse the RJED draft proposal approach to learning support and discuss the limitations of the tutoring model it promotes. The paper highlights the multidimensional role tutors should play in institutional open online learning support ecosystems and projects how artificial intelligence can contribute to further enhance the new emerging tutoring dimensions in digital learning environments.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
