Abstract

Distance higher education in Brazil in the last decade has undergone major transformations, with a significant growth in the number of enrollments and admissions of new students in the last decade, due to the institution of legal instruments that regulated it, in addition to guidelines issued by political power and interaction of various regulatory devices, as well as the influence of the Brazilian educational market.
The present study aims to identify the socioeconomic profile of students, as well as expose the possible results and effects produced by the expansion of this teaching modality in the main educational indicators.
The advancement of information and communication technologies propagated in developing countries in the 1990s, combined with the universalization of the internet, provided unprecedented ways of building knowledge, transmitting information, contributing to the creation of new communication systems, making the modality viable. at a distance, revolutionizing the teaching-learning process of educating the population.
Such a teaching modality is capable of overcoming physical barriers, reaching more people at a lower cost, compared to the face-to-face modality, contributing to the acquisition of skills, social inclusion and the development of human capital, especially in Brazil, which has continental dimensions and many inequalities. social services throughout its territory.
The Law of Guidelines and Bases boosted the demand for this educational level in Brazil by recognizing distance education courses and programs as legal and gave autonomy to Higher Education Institutions in opening decentralized units in the country and abroad, expanding the offer by internalizing it. of higher education in the national territory.
It is worth mentioning that the regulatory process especially promoted the private education network, which holds the majority of the total of 2.4 million enrollments in Brazil (INEP, 2019). On the other hand, the public higher education network had several structural problems to expand the offer of courses and vacancies in this modality, such as a lack of qualified personnel in distance education technologies and lack of funding for technological development in the implementation of distance education policies. Such difficulties were faced with the creation of consortia of public universities.
In Brazil, it can be inferred that the advancement of the distance modality provided the flexibility of access to higher education, enabling the internalization of this educational level to a large portion of the population that was excluded from this educational process. The growth of enrollments in this modality was basically due to the private network, with the offer of a variety of courses, combined with lower costs compared to the face-to-face modality, consequently the private network of this educational level reached, in 2019, 93.6% of participation in the total of enrollments in distance higher education, and in 2021 the number of entrants (INEP, 2019).