As representações sociais da educação a distância : a perspectiva de alunos de um curso presencial no contexto da possibilidade dos 20% a distância

Abstract

New legislative instruments have been emerging in the country, contributing to the regulation, adoption and recognition of Distance Education at all levels of education. One of these initiatives is Ordinance No. 4.059 / 04 -MEC that authorized higher education institutions (HEI) to introduce in the pedagogical and curricular organization of their recognized courses the offer of up to 20% of the total workload in disciplines that use the distance modality. This legislative instrument would represent in thesis an enormous step in the evolution and popularization of Distance Education. However, despite the promising possibilities brought about by this legal openness, the data on its adoption are discouraging. The literature indicates that one of the main reasons would be the negative view that exists in relation to the modality.This work analyzes the social representations of Distance Education by conventional students facing a degree in a public institution of higher education in Recife. The research is based on the theory of Social Representations (Moscovici, 1978/1981), specifically in its structural approach. The participants were 50 students of that course. As a data collection instrument, was used a multimethod questionnaire developed with three main stages besides the description of the research sample: one using the Words Association Test (WAT) to identify the likely central core and the peripheral region of the representation, the other based on the substitution technique, which called the respondents to show their vision and the vision of the others individuals of their social group about Distance Education in order to investigate a Mute Zone of these representations and finally a section to check acceptance of these individuals about introducing distance activities in their course. The data were interpreted using the framework of the four houses Vergè (1992) and content analysis. The results suggest as the representation content that distance education is easy, practical and flexible, but there is a mute zone of Distance Education, which demonstrates a lack of knowledge of the potential of this type of education, through the belief that it is a type of education based on low-quality , low market acceptance and low interaction and socializing. The existence of a regularity of negative content present in students' speeches helps to understand the reasons why the adoption of this teaching-learning process is still discouraging, pointing to the fact that the representations of these subjects are based on a Fordist model of distance education without commitment to quality. Thus, based on the diagnosis of these Social Representations, the research proposes a training course model to demystify these negative visions of the students to intermediate the introduction of the distance workload in their courses.