A survey of distance education in Brazil

ABED (2016) 2015 Brazilian Census for Distance Learning: Analytical Report on Distance Learning in Brazil São Paulo, Brazil: Associação Brasileira de Educação a Distância (ABED)

“In God we trust. All others must bring data.”

W. Edwards Deming, quoted in the report.

This is the 8th year that ABED (the Brazilian Association of Distance Education) has surveyed distance learning in Brazil. The 82 page report with another 100 or so pages of tables is available in both English and Portuguese.

Methodology

The report states:

Because institutions have chosen to participate voluntarily, the survey that feeds this document seeks to be comprehensive, but does not intend to establish an exhaustive scenario of distance learning in Brazil. Its analyses, instead, aim to present a picture of market trends in regards to the categories of institutions that work with the distance learning modality, the types of courses offered, the audience they reach, the execution of distance learning activities, their organization and even profitability, necessary investments and challenges inherent to this modality.

The report covers:

• Institutions accredited by the Brazilian National Education System at all levels: primary, technical, undergraduate and graduate;
• Formal and informal educational institutions who offer open courses.
• Institutions operating in corporate learning.
• Companies that supply distance learning products and services.

Blended courses are defined by Federal Law as having up to 20% of the workload offered in distance learning mode.

ABED contacted 1,145 institutions via email newsletter and an open invitation published on the association’s website, with information about the survey for all establishments operating in distance learning. In total the survey was based on 368 responses, of which 339 were educational institutions, and 69 ‘suppling’ organizations. The 339 educational institutions were made up as follows:

• public (federal, state and municipal): 92
• for profit: 114
• private not-for-profit: 71
• other: 62

Participating institutions were from 27 states across the whole of Brazil.

Results are broken down by a range of variables, such as type of organization, size, region, etc.

Main findings

This survey had a significantly increased number of participants over previous surveys conducted by ABED and confirms the growth in the number of institutions and companies working in distance learning in 2015:

• it identified a total of 5,048,000 students in fully distance or blended courses, of whom:
  • 1.1 million were in fully accredited (degree) courses
  • 3.9 million were in corporate or non-corporate open courses
• just over half (53%) are women and almost half are aged between 31-40
• 70% of the students are working as well as studying
• the most common discipline area for both fully online and blended courses is teacher education/training
• drop-out rates for distance learning courses are higher than for on-site courses, averaging between 26%-50% for fully distance accredited courses.
• over 50% of the institutions had a centralized management structure for distance learning courses and programs
• nearly a quarter of the surveyed institutions intend to increase their investments in distance learning in 2016, notably in strengthening blended learning
• the investments made by non-profit and for-profit private institutions were higher compared to that of public institutions,
• the majority of distance learning classes have between 31-50 students
• more than 60% of institutions used open source learning management systems, customized within the institution, of which 43% were cloud-based
• a good deal of information is provided about private companies offering distance learning services; these private companies provide services particularly to for-profit institutions.

Comment

Professor Fred Litto, the President of ABED, in his introduction states:

One must refer to quantitative data in order to be able to efficiently discuss what distance learning (DL) represents to a nation such as Brazil

This is a statement with which I fully concur, and I have lamented many times the complete lack of national data in Canada. The report is extremely wide-ranging and covers many areas that I have not seen in other national surveys. This no doubt is one of the benefits of doing surveys over a number of years.

Nevertheless I do have some serious concerns about this survey. Without a comparison with the total number of institutions in Brazil, it is difficult to know how representative this survey is. Even within the 1,145 institutions approached for the survey, the response rate was 32%.

Furthermore although there is a definition of blended learning given, I couldn’t find a definition of distance learning. In particular what proportion of the courses were fully online and what correspondence or print-based? There is a lot in the report about how text and audio-visual materials are acquired or developed, and even more about learning management systems, but as an outsider I am left wondering about how much is done online and how much by other methods. This is an important consideration given the different levels of access to the Internet in Brazil. Maybe though it has been covered in earlier reports.

However, given the huge challenge of surveying institutions in a country as large as Brazil (a population of 200 million and an area almost as large as the USA), and the tremendous differences between the regions and between socio-economic groups within regions, the report still provides a fascinating insight into distance learning in Brazil. For instance 15%-25% of the institutions surveyed offered open, ‘MOOC-like’ courses.

As always, you should read the full report yourself and come to your own conclusions, as there are many valuable nuggets buried in the more detail parts of the report, but it is clear that distance and especially blended learning continues to grow in Brazil, and ABED is to be congratulated for wrestling such a monster to the ground.