BRAZILIAN RESEARCH ON DISTANCE LEARNING, 1999-2003: A State-of-the Art Study

 

 

 

 

Fredric Michael Litto

Escola de Comunicação e Artes da USP –  frmlitto@usp.br

 

 

Andrea Filatro

Faculdade de Educação da USP –  afilatro@uol.com.br

 

 

Claudio André

Faculdade de Educação da USP –  cfandre@uol.com.br

 

 

 

TEMA D: Educação a Distância nos Sistemas Educacionais

 

 CATEGORIA 4: Outras - Pesquisa em Educação a Distância

 

 

 

Abstract:  The purpose of this study was to “map” the production of scholarly works in the field of distance learning (DL) in Brazil, using as the corpus of analysis the masters and doctoral theses successfully defended in the country’s graduate programs, as well as articles published in specialized scholarly journals. The corpus included 847 titles, which were analyzed within the categories of general subject, extent of coverage and year of appearance in the primary literature.

 

Keywords:  Distance learning, Online Education, Virtual Education, Research, State-of-the-Art, Brazil.

 

 

I – Objectives and Delimitations of the Study

 

            The objective of the study was to identify and analyze the themes emerging from research on Distance Learning (DL) in Brazil in the period 1999-2003.  We concentrated our attention on the scholarly production represented by 847 works, seeking to construct a panoramic view of the national research effort, and organizing this primary literature so as to determine tendencies, overlaping situations, gaps and challenges for further investigation.

            Any analysis of the state-of-the-art of research in DL must constantly maintain, in the background, an understanding of the nature of theory and practice in the field, which is a vast, complex phenomenon which maintains numerous interfaces with related fields of educational endeavors.  The multi-faceted nature of the phenomenon is reflected in the fields of knowledge which generate scholarly work in DL, such that the theses and articles which were the object of study here were brought forth from areas as different as Production Engineering, Mathematics and Statistics, Pedagogy, Communications, and others, each one with its particular paradigm and special contribution to be made for comprehending DL. This dispersion of the literature is also compounded by the fact that, throughout the world, research in DL is carried out not only in traditional academic institutions of higher learning but also in private companies, foundations, cultural organizations, and by independent investigators.

            Nevertheless, to orient our collection of the corpus of the literature, which would permit us to identify a “state-of-the-art,” we used the following criteria for inclusion of works:

·        be the result of systematic investigation based on quantitative measurement or some qualitative study supported by clearly-expressed criteria;   

·        demonstrate originality in its aims and in its conclusions.

Hence, the corpus included principally the theses successfully defended in the stricto sensu (requiring a traditional dissertative study) graduate study programs in Education and other areas of knowledge, in the period 1999-2003, and the scholarly articles published in the same period in two of the principal journals of the field. Because of the incomplete coverage by official sources of theses produced in the country, we believe that a number of works may have escaped our attention, but perhaps they will be included in a future continuation of this study.

            The significance of this type of investigation is that it fills a gap of information at the meta level, showing how a large number of researchers in a unique, populous country, are conducting their work.  Its results should be useful to graduate advisors in universities within Brazil and elsewhere, helping them to suggest topics for research to their advisees or planning new developments in graduate programs concentrating on DL as a practice; it could also be helpful to other researchers and librarians as a guide to already-existing literature; it may well be an important strategic tool for local, national, regional, and international agencies which support research or DL projects, as it furnishes indicators of tendencies and lacunas; and finally, it may serve as a stimulus to editors of learned journals who, seeing the gaps of studies in the area, can organize special issues of their publications, creating incentives for new research.

 

II – Methodology

            A – Data Collection

The first stage of research consisted of locating bibliographic references to the scholarly production related to DL, specifically for the period 1999-2003, which was expected to reflect the increasing maturity of the Internet as a factor of growth in DL, and which in turn facilitated access to the studies themselves. Various sources were used to obtain references to the appropriate theses among the 33,000 graduate theses defended each year in Brazil: the Banco Digital de Teses e Dissertações Eletrônicas do Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia (IBICT), and the Biblioteca Virtual de Educação a Distância do Prossiga (CNPq – National Council for Scientific and Technological Development).  But because of the incompleteness of these sources, we were forced to consult the virtual libraries of the principal academic institutions themselves: Saber and Dedalus of the University of São Paulo; Lumen of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo; Banco de Teses of the University of Brasília; Biblioteca Digital of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul; Banco de Teses e Dissertações of the Federal University of Santa Catarina; Banco Minerva of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; and the Biblioteca Digital of the State University of Campinas, São Paulo.¹  The scholarly articles were located in the data base of ABED – the Brazilian Association for Distance Education, whose records yielded the papers approved in the international congresses and national seminars organized by that Association, as well as the articles published in its new online journal, RBAAD-Brazilian Review of Open and Distance Learning; and also pertinent papers contained in the Annals of the National Congresses of ANPED – National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Education.

            Retrieval of the titles was done through the search terms “distance education” (educação à distância), “teaching at a distance” (ensino à distância), “learning at a distance” (aprendizagem à distância), “education on-line”  (educação on-line), “teaching on-line” (ensino online), “learning on-line” (aprendizagem on-line), “virtual education” (educação virtual), “virtual teaching” (ensino virtual), “virtual learning” (aprendizagem virtual), sought  out in the search engines of these data bases.

            All works which fell into the various “generations” of DL were included, namely, correspondence courses, tele-education (synchronous), multi-media models, and flexible learning (asynchronous, through the Internet). In all cases, the minimum information required for inclusion was: complete title, name of author or authors, institutional identification, key-words, abstract, and year of defense or publication. In some 4 to 5% of works found, it was impossible to discover the year of production, and these items were not included.

 

 

 

            B – Treatment of the Data

Once the pertinent works were identified, a digital record was established for each (32 doctoral dissertations, 459 masters theses and 356 journal articles) in a data base specially-prepared to manage this bibliographic information.²  The data base was structured so as to offer a visually-friendly form for each register containing rather complex information, as the following figure shows:

 

 

Figure 1 – Example of the principal screen of the data base management system

Initially, the dissertations, theses and articles were indexed together with the bibliographic references, the key-words, and the abstracts indicative of the contents.  Later on, the research staff filled out additional forms with analytical data, including a classification by categories and range of coverage.

            Once this stage had been reached, with the forms for indexing and classification filled out, statistics as to categories, coverage, instituitional origem and year of defense/publication were generated, preparing the data for interpretation by the staff.  To facilitate analysis, seven grand categories were established:

·        Philosophy, Policies and Strategies: general principles, strategies, politics and goals of distance education, general and local history of DL;

·        Content and Skills:  regular curricular content, extra-curricular content, values, attitudes, basic intellectual and technical skills;

·        Pedagogies and Technologies:  doctrines, principles and methods of distance education aided by information and communication technologies;

·        Support and Services:  physical and virtual infra-structure, help networks, and DL projects;

·        Management and Logistics:  articulation of human, material, and financial resources for carrying-out DL projects;

·        Research and Evaluation:  qualitative and quantitative descriptions of student performance, of the internal didactic situation created by the institution and by agents of the teaching-learning process;

·        Quality Assurance and Certification:  evaluation of teaching quality and of the results of the education given by external and central authorities, the certification of competencies, of proficiency and professional qualification.

 

These categories are used by the ICDE-International Council for Open And Distance Learning to classify the themes of sessions in its World Conferences on Open and Distance Learning.  To a certain extent, the categories reflect the process involved in DL: a general definition of principles and strategies, selection of content and skills, choice of educational methods and techniques, organization of the support infrastructure, implantation management, and evaluation and certification.  We refined somewhat the domains of the categories by extracting definitions from the Thesaurus Brasileiro de Educação (Brazilian Thesaurus of Education),³ and then classified the material found according to its coverage and the educational audience to which it was directed, in the following categories:

·        Corporate Education:  training, professional development and updating in the environment of companies, public, private, and non-governmental organizations;

·        Education of Young Adults:  initiatives directed at benefiting young adults with little schooling and educational programs geared specifically to young people and adults;

·        Special education:  programs directed at the education of persons with physical or mental disabilities ;

·        Infant Education: educational programs for children from 0 to 10 years of age;

·        Primary Level Schooling:  programs of basic, obligatory schooling;

·        Secondary Level Schooling:  post-primary level schooling, with a view towards deepening basic learning, preparation for work and educating the fully-rounded citizen; it includes program of vocational-technical training;

·        Higher Education:  programs of undergraduate studies and graduate studies (with and without theses);

·        Education in Social Movements:  programs related to education for the environment, workers unions, movements of those without land, re-education of prisoners, and the like;

·        Teacher Training:  governmental and private initiatives to augment the degree of schooling of teachers or to prepare them for distance education or for the use of information and communication technologies in the classroom;

·        Multi-Faceted Applications:  research applicable to all or more than just one area of coverage.⁴

III – Results

            A – Overall View of the Data

We observed significant productivity among the masters-degree programs (459 theses, or 54.0 % of the total of works found) and in the papers presented in scholarly meetings (356 papers, or 42.0 % of the total), but the field appears to be very modest in producing advanced studies at the doctoral level (32 works, corresponding to only 4.0 % of the total).  Ninety percent of the papers (321 in absolute numbers) were contributions to the international and national meetings organized in the period by ABED-the Brazilian Distance Learning Association.  Ten percent of the articles (35) were prepared for the annual meetings of ANPED-the Association for Graduate Studies and Research in Education, specifically for the Group in Communication and Education.  With regard to the theses, it was possible to analyze the contributions of the principal institutions, state by state and by region in the country, revealing the noteworthy case of the high productivity of the State of Santa Catarina, in the south of Brazil. The Federal University of Santa Catarina, where there was a fortuitous union of circumstances (forward-looking leadership and able management, strong financial support from State and Federal governments and the realization of a large number of DL projects for internal and external partners), resulted in the generation of an extraordinary number of papers and theses.⁵

 

 

          Table 1 – Theses and Dissertationss on Distance Learning (1999-2003) by Region, State and Institution

 

B – Interpretation by Year of  Publication

 

           We observed a very positive rate of growth beginning in 1999 (62 titles, or 7.32% of the total), with production growing in each subsequent year (129 titles, or 15.23% of the total in 2000; 160 titles, or 18.89% of the total in 2001), and practically doubling in growth in 2002 (288 titles, or 34.0 % of the total).  The reduction of productivity in 2003 (208 titles, or 24.56% of the total) could be in part a consequence of the so-called “explosion of the bubble,” the 2000-2001 phenomenon when the overheated NASDAQ investment market collapsed, weakening belief in the possibilities of companies, government, and society in dot.com ventures and in the revolutionary power of technology in general.  Another cause might have been the re-structuring of the highly productive Graduate Program in Production Engineering at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, because of the criticism, by an evaluating committee sent by the Ministry of Education, of the program having too many students per advisor. Nevertheless, the annual “distribution” of the titles among theses, dissertations and scholarly journal articles shows reasonable coherency, with the exception of 2001, when the number of articles was rather low in relation to the annual average of articles (71.20%) and in relation to the number of theses and dissertations successfully defended.

 

                       Table 2 – Titles in Distance Learning by Year of Publication