Distance education in Brazil and the insertion of the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) in this context

Abstract

Since the early twentieth century, the distance education has been used in Brazil as an alternative for the expansion and democratization in different levels, making possible the training of many people, including, that of the popular layers with financial, time and geographic limitations, that, without this resource, they could never achieve that goal. In this sense, the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) has developed a very important role to the education of the state of Ceará, through diverse experiences in the modality, specially, through their distance graduate courses, offered by UFC Virtual Institute. The purpose of this paper is to describe the evolution of the distance education in Brazil and report the experiences developed in the UFC to insert itself into the modality. For this, a bibliographic search was carried out through texts prepared by scholars in the field. It is concluded that the distance education in Brazil has played a key role in the national education, favoring the increase of the number of enrollments in higher education and contributing to the expansion and democratization of education in the country. It is also noted that UFC, in 18 years, since creation of the UFC Virtual Institute, has contributed strongly to the increase of number of enrollments in the institution and taken the training opportunity to the several regions of the state of Ceará.