EDMEDIA'96
Proposal for Full Paper
Distance Education and Telelearning
Federal University of Bahia - Faculty of Education
Av. Cons. Pedro Luis, 217/304
40223-060 - Salvador - Bahia - Brazil
Phone: + 55 71 975 7048
Fax : + 55 71 235 2228
E.mail: pretto@ufba.br
AV equipment requested: overhead projecto
The development of new communication and information technologies is occurring at an overwhelming pace. I use the term communication to refer to mass-media systems such as TV and cable networks, as they are currently structured. The term information refers to computer-based technologies such as Internet, Intranet and on-line services, etc.
All over the world there has been a merging of several once divergent fields, that until recently had even been competitors, such as large communication, information and entertainment corporations. TheEnglish publication Screen Digest [1] shows us an intersting map of this converging media landscape in its Jannury 1994 issue .
Today's electronic equipment is becoming obsolete very quickly and once separate devices are converging because of the rapid evolution of technology [2] . According to Screen Digest, since 1992, multimedia "is coming to signify a specific convergent concept in which single carriers deliver a complete audio-visual range".[3]
Distances shrink due to the myriad possibilities for communication. In Brazil, academicians are discussing whether in fact we are taking full advantage of this world of information, keeping in mind the great social disparities that exist in our country an d in other developing countries.
According to the 1995 National Household Survey (PNDA- Programa Nacional de Amostragem Domiciliar) carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) , 78% of Brazilian households have televisions, which makes it possible for the general population to watch the programming of the large national networks. The most important broadcasting system, whose signals can be tuned in in 99% of Brazilian municipalities, is Rede Globo, controlled by the Roberto Marinho family.
They control, according to the Folha de São Paulo, 60% of the advertising market through their 17 TV stations and associated TV channels. Recently, Rede Globo established an association with the Murdoch Group, thus making it the fifth largest communications conglomerate in the world and they are beginning to operate the DBS TV system in Latin America.
However, this is only one-way communication. True communication requires interactivity with information flowing in two or more directions. The same IBGE survey showed that only 22% of Brazilian households have a telephone line, which is a basic requirement for access to the Internet.
In Brazil, the policies of the current federal administration have been detrimental to public universities by cutting budgets and reducing staff. They have even proposed revoking the policy of free public education which has been in effect since the system was established. The Brazilian public university system is vast and covers the major population centers of all 27 Brazilian states. In the last few years an increase in private universities has changed the face of public education in Brazil.
The new proposal also includes a controversial subject: university autonomy. Represented as an important advantage of a new “democratic” system, the type of autonomy proposed is considered by some within the university as a trap, because outside large urban centers, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the public universities and most individual faculties are not and will never be economically viable.
On the other hand, Brazil is going through a difficult time with respect to its institutions of higher education. One can infer from its movements, pronouncements and projects that the government is putting into practice a plan to suffocate these institutions. This discussion, while not at the top of the list of Brazilian society as a whole, is going on inside the universities in a very intense manner, due mainly to the government’s proposals regarding university autonomy. The situation is critical and I consider it of the utmost importance to establish a relationship between this topic and the current distance education projects being discussed in Brazil, because I do not think it is possible to overcome the backwardness of the educational system without a successful partnership between the public institutions of higher learning and the public primary and secondary educational systems.
We are experiencing a sort of generalized fever of distance education projects in an attempt to solve education problems as if it were possible to develop these projects without taking into account all the aspects of this complex system.
It is precisely this administration, which is providing, in theory, incentives to distance education projects, including the creation of a department specifically for the subject (Secretariat of Distance Education), that has clearly stated its position against maintaining the federal higher education system. This, in my opinion, introduces an inherent contradiction, difficult to overcome and that, in this paper, I intend to discuss, analyzing the situation in Bahia.
In Brazil, there have been myriad initiatives to develop distance education projects. Parallel to the movement in the private sector, that since the 1960s has been active in this area, especially by providing technical courses for specialized training, (the pioneering Brazilian Universal Institute is a fine example), some other significant governmental movements in this field are worthy of mention.
One of the pioneers in Brazil, the Saci Project was implemented experimentally in the State of Rio Grande do Norte in northeastern Brazil, at the end of the 1960s without achieving significant results, as Laymert Garcia dos Santos stated in his well reasoned book Desregulagens [4]. Other experiments in the filed were or are being developed in Brazil, as is the case of the regular courses offered by the Educational TVs of the states of Maranhão, Ceará and Amazonas (northeastern and northern Brazil), to meet the needs of the last three grades of primary school.[5]
According to Lobo and Leobons [6], there have been innumerable distance education initiatives dealing with supplementary education and teaching by correspondence. In 1971 the Brazilian Educational Technology Association (ABT) was created. Since 1972, it has maintained advanced training courses for Primary School Certification and publish a periodical, Tecnologia Educacional, thereby becoming a space for discussions on the topic. As Ligia Leite explains, both the Association and the periodical have undergone name-changes reflecting the evolution of the concept of the relationship between education and communication technologies.[7]
The National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (INEP) published, in 1987, a State-of-the-Art [8] report on the matter (Bibliografia Especializada em Educação - Educação à D istância), as a part of the Latin-American Information and Documentation Network - REDUC, that integrates 23 educational research centers in 17 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean .
As I stated previously [9], in 1986, the Education Ministry tried to breathe new life into the Saci Project based on the work of an Inter-Ministerial Commission, officially established pursuant to charter nº 390/86, involving both the Education and Communications Ministries, with the aim of studying "the possibility of implementing a basic education system via satellite". The team from the Communications Ministry showed a great deal of interest in providing incentives to use the Brazilian geostationary satellite for educational purposes. It was not clear, obviously, which pedagogical project would be the cornerstone of this initiative. The very group that chartered the commission was already showing signs that it was looking to implement a parallel educational system with classes being transmitted from Brasília (or Rio de Janeiro) to the rest of Brazil and captured by nearly 30 thousand satellite dishes that would be installed in the different Brazilian municipalities This meddling by other ministries in education was not a novelty. According to Maria Luiza Belloni, this had already occurred when the Saci Project was negotiated, when the Education Minister (1970/1974) evidently became irritated with the director of INPE who "invaded without ceremony the dominion reserved for the Ministry of Education and Culture."[10]
When the Commission’s work was finished, a generic report was published without any concrete decision on the use of the satellite for educational purposes. Nine years later, the Education Ministry launched its TV-School project, also centered on the use of satellites and satellite dishes in the schools, this time to train primary school teachers. Numerous articles are being produced or have already been published on the subject and we will not go into further detail here.
This collection of experiences and experiments in the field of distance education has made us reflect more deeply on the need to evaluate the information that is already available while at the same time seeking to introduce new resources in communication and information technology into the day to day lives of our traditional face-to-face schools. This movement, an integral part of a larger project on the transformation of public education in Bahia, will be described and analyzed from this point on.
I do not deny the importance of these projects and programs. I believe it is necessary, nevertheless, to analyze the need for and the size of this type of project, taking into account the context of each and every Brazilian state. In order to overcome the above- mentiond contradiction, we will reflect upon, in Bahia, the feasibility of simultaneously strengthening public learning institutions at all levels and promoting a high degree of interaction among them.
In Bahia we have been pondering this issue a great deal since the current situation here does not lead us, a priori, to think that we need distance education programs to the degree and with the characteristics of other projects that are being implemented in Brazil. Keeping this situation and the current conditions in Bahia in mind, we are analyzing - evidently with many internal conflicts - the real need to implement distance education programs without first considering our reality and, principally, our presence, as a public university system in the state as a whole. There are five public universities, spread over 21 campi, covering a good portion of Bahian territory.
Within this context, it is important to reflect a little upon the need to establish as a priority a closer relationship between theoretical analyses - produced inside the universities - and the day-to-day life of our primary and secondary schools, giving special emphasis to those professionals who, already in active service, need to be adequately qualified to carry out their activities. Especially if we are referring to the great number of teachers who, without adequate training, work almost heroically in primary and secondary schools, without the minimum academic qualifications to fulfill their roles as education professionals.
The contradiction is even greater if we consider that the public schools have been abandoned, the teachers are unprepared and appealing for support, at the same time that we have public universities present in practically major part of the state; universities that, good or bad, are carrying out their activities - under absolutely precarious conditions - and working intensely with the public education system in each of the regions where they are located.
We believe it is important at this historical moment to use new technologies, that shrink distances and bring professors and students from these universities together, to foster group action and build a closer relationship between the public university, secondary and primary school systems.
This combined institutional effort will be based on the desire to support each school, in each region, in the development of a collective process to provide teachers working in the classroom with the necessary academic qualifications and keep them up-to-date. To develop this project it is necessary to work with all the new resources in information and communication technologies in order to, by bringing the currently existing programs and projects together, re-direct them collectively in an attempt to diminish the distances that separate the different universities and, principally, the universities and the public education system.
When thinking about reducing distances, our aim is not merely to increase the number of people who have access to education. Nor do we want to create conflicts between each of the groups and on-going projects. The use of these technological resources is fundamental given that they are not only new technologies - forced on us by the electronics industries - they are the elements that are structuring a new language, whose form and internal logic are determined by a secret alliance between electronics and the human spirit.[11]
In this perspective, the actions taken will not be aimed at creating curricula and didactic programs and materials in a centralized manner, so as to use the new technologies to flood the school with information. This process should be developed based on a critical analysis of on-going projects in the universities and education ministries (state and municipal), so that when training teachers it is possible to act in conjunction with the public schools based on three basic interdependent elements.
These interdependent elements are considered the minimum requirements for the development of the project since the aim is not simply to develop current training, advanced training and certification programs for teachers, at a distance, as if merely introducing new technological resources were somehow a guarantee of new and improved training methods for these teachers. Nor do we simply want to develop current certification programs - or part of them - at a distance, with the simple objective of "increasing the number of graduates". To the contrary, we believe that new technological resources, which make it possible to take actions at a distance in conjunction with those taken face-to-face, constitute the structuring elements of a new pedagogical vision, because, in reality, they are the elements composing a new vision of the production of knowledge on planet on the eve of a new millennium.
[1] Screen Digest, January, 1994, p. 8 - 15
[2] Gilder, George A Vida após a Televisão, (originaly Life After Television), Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, 1996.
[3] Screen Digest,. November, 1992, p. 249.
[4] SANTOS, Laymert Garcia dos Desregulagens, São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1981.
[5] For more information, see: Alonso, Katia Morosov Alonso, Educação a Distância no Brasil: busca de identidade in Preti, Oreste Educação a distância - inícios e indícios de um percurso, Cuiabá: UFMT, p.57-74, 1996.
[6] Lobo Neto, F. J da S. e Leobons, S. G. P. Educação à Distância na Educação de 1º e 2º Grausin Tecnologia Educacional - revista da ABT, ano XVII, nº 80/81, jan/abr. 88, p. 41.
[7] Leite, Ligia et alli Revista Tecnologia Educacional: sua trajetóriain Revista Tecnologia Educacional, ABT, Rio, nov.dez.92, p. 42-47.
[8] MEC Bibliografia Especializada em Educação - Educação à Distância, Brasília, 1987.
[9] Pretto, Nelson De Luca Uma escola sem/com futuro - educação e multimedia, São Paulo: Papirus, 1996.
[10] Belloni, Maria Luiza, A Televisão Educativa no Brasil - o fracasso dos modelos tecnocráticos, mimeo, 1983, p.176.
[11] BABIN, Pierre Piccola grammatica dei media, Torino/Italia: Editrice Elle Di Ci, 1993, p.6.
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