Distance Education gains strength in Brazil
MEC has sought to advance in dialogue and in actions whose central axis is the expansion of the teaching modality
Nov 28, Brasilia: National Distance Education Day, the Ministry of Education celebrates the advances in online education in Brazil.
Digital education innovates and revolutionizes learning approaches and more than that, it has been used effectively to promote teaching quality and educational equity by allowing students to access information, explore different domains of knowledge and create new skills, regardless of location.
It is worth noting that technology has been useful in helping students and the academic community to deal with the uncertainties and rapid changes in today's society due to the coronavirus.
Faced with these changes in the global education scenario, the Higher Education Secretariat of the Ministry of Education (SESu / MEC) has sought to advance the dialogue and actions that have the expansion of higher education in Brazil as its central axis, through the modality of Distance Education (DE), maintaining the equity and quality of the educational process.
SESu / MEC, understanding the relevance of actions that include distance education, has been working, since May 2020, in the Plan for the Expansion of Distance Education in Federal Institutions of Higher Education (IFES). As the main objective, the project aims to expand access and permanence of students through distance education and ensure the quality of the offer. More than that, the initiative aims to expand, restructure and optimize the offer of distance education through the IFES network.
Projects and advances
It is worth mentioning that some projects are already on the radar of actions of SESu / MEC, such as Alunos Conectados and R&D. The Connected Students was developed through consultations with the Federal Universities and Institutions of the Federal Network of Professional Scientific and Technological Education to obtain updated information about the actions of assistance to students in socioeconomic vulnerability. Thus, it was possible to map the per capita family income of students, aiming at resources to support actions and define strategies to expand connectivity in order to allow the continuity of academic activities amid social isolation measures.
The R&D project, on the other hand, consists of supporting actions aimed at reducing dropout in higher education by promoting research and experimental development of solutions based on Artificial Intelligence to support pedagogical interventions. The initiative provides for the definition of requirements, analysis and evaluation of the effectiveness of actions that take into account the structural, organizational and geographical scenario of the institutions. Six federal universities (UFG, UFPA, UNIPAMA, UFERSA, UNIFEI and UFSCAR) participate in the pilot project in order to assess its effectiveness.
In addition to the projects, the rules of the Unified Selection System (Sisu) were changed this year to allow the offer of places in Higher Education courses in the distance learning modality. With this, for the first time since the creation of Sisu, the selection process for the second half of 2020 could count on the availability of places for these courses.
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