Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: Gleice Louise Garcia Costa dos Santos

Analysis of the Use of Resources in a Virtual Environment Learning and School Dropout

Distance Education, Virtual Learning Environment, Higher Education, Open University of Brazil, Educational Technologies.

Many educational problems are complex and there are no quick fixes with immediate answers to solve them. School dropout is one of these problems and deserves special attention, which justifies the need to carry out studies, research and critical reflections on the nuances that underlie, permeate and constitute approaches that can contribute to understanding and combating this phenomenon. Dropout brings consequences both for the student and for society, which favors social inequality, influences the cognitive, intellectual and cultural development of students and thus, the greater the number of students who drop out, the greater the professional disqualification and the social differentiation. Another issue is the waste of invested resources, both for public and private institutions, which are high in the modalities: face-to-face and distance learning. Although distance education has availability of access to resources, flexibility of schedules, is economically more advantageous, provides monitoring through teachers and tutors and grants autonomy for the student to manage their studies, dropout rates in this modality have higher rates and , therefore, the topic needs attention, since it may be associated with factors such as: lack of adaptation to the modality, little motivation, less time for the student to develop the proposed activities and low technology skills. The use of Information and Communication Technology brings people together, even if they are physically distant, but it can create a problem for those who do not have access to technological resources, which makes it an obstacle for people who do not have or have not developed certain skills. The technology resources that distance education uses through Virtual Learning Environments allow the construction of knowledge to occur in different spaces, with teachers and students developing activities in different places or times. Thus, the use of these educational technology resources available in Virtual Learning Environments will be addressed in this work from a mapping of educational resources used in undergraduate courses of the Open University of Brazil program at the University of Brasília. The mapping of dropout data can help compose an overview of students’ permanence in distance courses. The present research is characterized by being of the exploratory case study type and in it a quantitative approach was used, in which the data analysis carried out identified the most used resources and related them to the dropout rate of the respective courses. v Throughout the data analysis, it was possible to identify the dropout rates of the courses and, thus, relate them to the use of resources in the Virtual Learning Environment, which made it possible to map a scenario of the relationship between these two themes: dropout and use of technologies in Virtual Learning Environments.