Uma Análise das Experiências de Professores Envolvidos em Programas de Educação a Distância no Brasil

Use of the World Wide Web (WWW) to support distance education has substantially increased in recent years. Several environments have been proposed and developed to help and lighten the teacher's work load in these courses, which turned out to be heavier than in traditional ones. However, there is still a lot to be done in order to make the management of such courses less of a burden, mainly with respect to interaction between the various actors (teachers and students) in the environment. \par During a Web-based course at the end of 1998, several interesting aspects were observed relating to the teacher's difficulties in overseeing and evaluating the students. In order to contrast the results of this observation with similar experiments, we performed a series of interviews with teachers who work on distance education projects at several Brazilian institutions. Thus, based on the information we obtained, we describe here the teachers' experiences and suggestions for improving the process. In addition, we point out here the main difficulties we identified and we discuss possible solutions.

2000