Opinion – Sou Ciência: Tragic scenario in EAD, but known

In addition to the tragic result in Distance Learning in private institutions, with more than 2/3 of the courses with below-acceptable grades, at the other end of the National Student Performance Exam (Enade) held in November 2021, only 0.1% of young graduates of private undergraduate courses offered at a distance in Brazil scored the highest on the Exam.

A tragic and well-known scenario, both by educators and by the authorities, which unfortunately confirms the results of one of the surveys published by SoU_Ciência.

Deepening the analysis of the results of the private HEIs, we noticed that they improve negligibly when the focus is on face-to-face courses: 39.2% of the graduates of these institutions obtained unsatisfactory grades (1 and 2) and less than 2% had the maximum grade in the Exam ( note 5).

But when we look at face-to-face courses at public universities, the scenario fortunately changes: the maximum grade 5 is obtained by almost 10% of the graduates (5 times more than those who graduate from private institutions) and only 19% obtain grades 1 and 1. 2 (less than half of the private ones).

But why this happen?

The grades are, without a shadow of a doubt, related to the characteristics of higher institutions and the training they offer. In the case of for-profit private companies, we found that they employ very few professors with a doctoral degree or who are exclusively dedicated to the activities they perform and suffer from the high number of students for which they are responsible, preventing a more careful follow-up and procedural evaluation. In addition, they almost do not carry out research and graduate activities, that is, they are not always up-to-date in relation to their areas and producing knowledge, the opposite of what happens in public universities.

The little investment in faculty and research, combined with the exponential increase in massified distance learning courses, are ways that increase the profits of private institutions, deliver poor quality diplomas and respond only to the pressures of the educational market. Distance learning in private institutions is the new line of business, with reduced personnel and infrastructure costs, cheaper monthly fees, reaching a new audience, but which, in the vast majority of cases, will receive training of poor quality or inadequate for their training. Clear measures to change this predatory and poorly regulated situation should be on the agendas of present and future rulers.

We have already shown that the Distance Education modality has had an enormous growth in recent years, which has also been reflected in the number of graduates who participate in Enade. In the 2021 edition, 49.8% of the participants completed their degrees in distance learning courses, of which 90% were enrolled in private institutions and 76% in for-profit institutions.

Both Enade 2021 and the previous ones show that the quality of distance education training in for-profit private institutions is much lower than that of their own on-site courses, but, above all, the quality is very low compared to the training offered by public universities.

The current Enade cycle evaluated Bachelors, Degrees and Technological Sciences in several areas: Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, Philosophy, Geography, History, Literature, Physical Education, Pedagogy, Visual Arts, Music and Design and Social, Biological, Information and computing.

The most disastrous, therefore, is to verify that practically all the Brazilian Basic Education teacher training courses were evaluated in this edition of the Exam: 75% of the participants were undergraduates. Of these, 66% completed their courses in private institutions. A scenario that unfortunately indicates how much we have to fear for the quality of training to be received by our children and young people with teachers trained in these conditions.

The results obtained by the participants enrolled in the Degrees of the private for-profit HEIs do not let us lie. Of 37,000 graduates to be teachers, almost 19,000 scored below acceptable levels and only 900 reached the level of quality. Let’s see:

Classes are being offered in classes full of students, in the EAD modality, sometimes thousands of students for a single teacher, who is responsible for disciplines in more than one area of ​​knowledge, therefore not being a specialist. As a result, the content is superficial and does not go beyond manuals in their respective areas, resulting in a mediocre training that repeats common sense. In these HEIs, many students are of lower income, had precarious basic education and therefore should have closer monitoring and complementary activities, in a pedagogical project that considers this condition. But what happens is the opposite, the massification, standardization and impersonality in training with industrially packaged content.

The Professional Councils are equally apprehensive and even annoyed in giving registration and professional card to EAD graduates. Graduates from a distance in applied professions, such as engineering, architecture and urbanism, dentistry, among others, would they be able to exercise their profession with the due responsibility, expertise and competence? Some of the Councils are in court trying to prevent the professional registration of EAD graduates, but as long as the MEC maintains the authorization, they have lost the battle in the courts. The question arises about the motivation for such permissiveness by the MEC, since the Temer government, in indiscriminately authorizing courses and vacancies in distance education, and who is interested in this. Only Medicine was able to resist the distance education business.

That is why, among other points, we at SoU_Ciência and other 20 entities that make up our Society Council propose to future government officials: 1) review the system of regulation and supervision of private Higher Education, especially Distance Education, establishing course quality control procedures; 2) review the autonomy of opening new courses by low quality HEIs; 3) regulate the maximum number of enrollments per teacher, ensuring the quality of the teaching-learning process and that 4) the evaluation systems consider that the private sector must follow the public perspective of education as a social good, with the public sector being the reference quality for others.