Distance education focus: A study on the Brazilian scientific production

Abstract

Distance education (DE) has been revealed as a significant trend in the educational sphere, especially in higher education. The method is not new in the educational world, since the first records of its use were identified in 1728 through a correspondence course in the city of Boston, USA. However, the word in evidence at the height of DE today is the “interaction”, which is made possible by communication technologies, more and more fluent and effective. Today, there is even real-time interaction, provided by video conferencing, for example, though which people, spatially separated, attend a class synchronously. Thus, the educational institutions that offer it need to be aware on how best to act with respect to their students and organizational processes. The aim of this study was to analyze the scientific production in the field of administration on the topic of DE and to identify models of critical success factors developed in scientific articles in the area. To this end, the main concepts of DE were presented. All articles, which addressed issues related to distance education and which were available electronically, published in the annals of every event organized by the Brazilian Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Management (Anpad) and articles published in Brazilian journals in area of management with the highest score (A1, A2, B1 and B2) were identified and analyzed according to the classification Quali-Capes 2010, regardless of the time of publishing. In the end, there were 71 scientific papers, whose contents were classified according to the following criteria: distribution by journals/event, annual, nature of the analysis, approach, main techniques of data collection, bibliographic factor, and identification of the critical factors of success. These criteria were inspired by the work of Paiva, Oliveira and Melo (2008) and Riss and Grohmann (2011). It was noticed that DE is still seen as a “novelty” in the academia and is in need of research that seeks to enlighten the subterfuge of its process in order to minimize its failures and barriers and maximize positive results.