UM MODELO INOVADOR E SUSTENTÁVEL PARA EDUCAÇÃO A DISTÂNCIA EM UMA REDE INTERNACIONAL

Resumo

The purpose of this document is to describe an institutional case for higher education managed and implemented by this author and her team while academic and online courses principal by perspectives as cooperation and innovative processes, in a company of education in Brazil, in the last 3 years. The Company will be called here as Company X, in order to ethically preserve its identity. It is a pan-regional higher education network of universities in the Latin America and Caribbean region, but a medium group in Brazil with 55 thousand students and it has two universities in Brazil. The role of this Board is organized into three responsibilities: creation of contents and methodologies for all the courses of the two universities; the training of the professors to act in the courses and the monitoring of the whole process (of production and operational) of the distance modality. For a sustainable and innovative model it was necessary to carry out a vast study on the status quo of the model in force at the time and, from this evaluation, to detect problems and strengths in order to create dimensions and indicators for necessary changes throughout the world. Based on assumptions from Company X such as regulation in Brazil for higher education and academic quality, we started with a process to understand and to promote what could be the ideal for the institutional context, which will be described here. It was considered the Brazilian context, critical rates of poverty, low demographic and basic education indexes and other aspects, and with this it was verified the necessity of the balance among three pillars, low price – distance education/hybrid courses – high quality in education. Then, from more macro considerations, and from the identification of what should be improved, such as the abandonment rates, boring subjects, inefficient capacities, costs and long delays in production, we set out to model co-creation with the academic community students, teachers, authors and technical and administrative staff. The design of the sustainable model involved the resizing of the roles of the Company's different teams, partnerships with technology companies, the use of open and free resources, continuous training based on active and innovative methodologies, global trends and the autonomy of teachers and of authors for creations, provided that in accordance with the Brazilian regulation and the brand of Company X.