Curriculum design and tutoring in open higher education in Mexico: a scoping review

Abstract

University tutoring and curriculum design, two fields that, despite their functional relationship, were rarely studied together within open and distance systems in the Mexican education system. This article documented a scoping review, informed by a nine-phase model originally designed for systematic reviews, whose objective was to analyze recent trends regarding tutoring and curriculum design in higher education, with particular attention to the open and distance modalities. The search was conducted across seven databases between 2020 and 2026; sixty records were retrieved that, after applying eligibility criteria and removing duplicates, were reduced to twelve studies: seven met all eligibility criteria and were included in the analysis, four were kept as theoretical antecedents for falling outside the 2020-2026 time range, and one was excluded for corresponding to a different educational level. Six of the seven included studies were organized into three thematic axes: virtual tutoring, peer tutoring, and academic advising; the seventh, of a theoretical nature, was taken up as a transversal conceptual reference. In the analyzed corpus, no studies were identified that simultaneously integrated tutoring, curriculum design, and the open modality within the Mexican institutional education context.