You are Paula Andrea Villamizar, national director of tutoring at Universidad Virtual Cordillera (UVC), in Colombia. It is Tuesday 13 January 2026 and the Ministry requires you to prove within six months that your 1,500 tutors answer students in under 24 hours. On Friday the rector wants your plan, and the first question is how you will measure their work.
The situation
UVC's tutors work from home, in cities and small towns all over the country: they answer forums and emails, grade assignments and run live sessions. Each one looks after about 120 students per term, on an eight-hour-a-day contract. Twelve programmes are renewing their accreditation with the Ministry of National Education; they enrol 45,000 students who pay about 85,000 million pesos in tuition.
The platform shows the symptom precisely. A tutor takes 16 hours on average to answer, but with an enormous spread: a quarter take more than 28. Only 65% of answers meet the 24-hour standard, student satisfaction stands at 66%, and tutors' activity peaks between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m., when almost every student has already logged off. This morning 312 messages were still unanswered from the night before.
The well-being survey tells the other half: 48% of tutors work more than nine hours a day and 52% sleep less than six. Stress-related sick leave already costs 340 million pesos a year, almost three times as much as two years ago, and the occupational-risk insurer has sent a warning. Conditions are not the same for everyone either: "I spend two hours a day waiting for the platform to load," wrote a tutor in Quibdó.
Nobody in management agrees. The vice-rector for administration, Germán Acosta, wants software that records screen activity: "If we can't see what they do, we don't know who is working." The head of human resources, Gloria Patiño, points to the data-protection law and to the fact that tutors already work too much. School coordinators want eight connected hours; the tutors' representatives want complete freedom of schedule. You have 150 million pesos per quarter.