Luciano Sathler Rosa Guimarães1

The way Higher Education is organized in Brazil tends to reflect and reinforce the deep inequalities that mark the history and the present of the country. Starting with the Brazil Colony,

including the times of the Proclamation of the Republic, the New State, the Military Dictatorship and until present days, a mode of production based on the extractive oligopolies of abundant natural resources and on export monocultures of low productivity, was favored.

This economy based on primary products and enterprises of low technological intensity was sustained by the exploitation of slaves and

1 Bachelor's degree in Social communication – Qualification in Advertising and Propaganda by PUC - MG. Master's degree in Business Administration from the Methodist University of São Paulo and doctorate in Administration by FEA / USP. Has a specialization in University Management by the Interamerican University Organization / CRUB and in Marketing Strategic Management by CEPEAD / UFMG. He is currently Rector of the Methodist University Center Izabela Hendrix, in Belo Horizonte (MG); National Director of Distance Education in Methodist educational institutions; Director of the Brazilian Distance Education Association - ABED; and professor at the Methodist University of São Paulo. Curator of the site: http://inovacaoeducacional.com.br, addressing the themes: University Management - Distance Education - Educational Innovation - Technology in Education and Organizational Learning.

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The distinctive character of our ethnic transfiguration is the continuity, through the centuries, of crucial elements of the archaic social order, of the dependence of the economy and of the spurious character of culture. Today, we are on the eve of even more comprehensive changes, because a more radical technological revolution is emerging on the horizon. If we once again allow ourselves to be consumers of their fruits, instead of dominate their new technology, the threats to our survival and to national sovereignty will be even more intense.

Darcy Ribeiro

immigrants, succeeded by the impoverishment of the majority of the population and the continued deterioration of labor relations.

Having the support of economy, cheap labor and available in abundance, even with little or no formal education, was what allowed all be late, delayed, slow and poorly planned in Brazilian education.

These factors, and many others, purposely inhibited the development of a quality education system for everyone, whose occasional exceptions reinforce the need to review the whole. We remain unable to transform reality for emancipation in a national project that promotes the common good.

It is worth remembering that if until 1930 the main contingent of labor was born and grown outside colonial and national territory, today, in a clear and continuous alignment with this historical fact, the de-socialization and the depersonalization of the most impoverished ones, added to the racism, to feed the mental model that propitiates to convert people into merchandise are factors of production at low cost. This helps to compose an inhospitable and incompatible environment for scientific development and innovation.

The formation of more people who could participate critically and autonomously for inclusive, equitable and sustainable development was something to be avoided by the elites who plotted the main political movements. The elite of Brazil, formed mainly in the University of Coimbra, could be "illustrated, cultivated at times, but never cultured", in the words of Anísio Teixeira.

In the 20th century, the New State, which implemented the legal figure of the university for the first time in the country, did so as "a reaction to the liberalization and modernization movements of the cultural spheres in Brazilian society, according to the clever motto of let’s make the revolution before the people do it".

In the 1960s and 1970s, economists who populated the national scene and conducted public policies during the Military Dictatorship claimed that it was necessary, first, to grow the cake and then distribute it. However, a historical series that analyzes the concentration of income in the hands of the richest 1% of Brazil's population, from 1927 to 2013, shows that the income accumulation at the top of the pyramid promoted a widening gap between the richest and the poorest, in this period.

That is to say, it was not only due to the accelerated growth of the economy, initiated in 1968, and the not attended demand by more qualified workers that caused the rise of inequality. At the time, the so-called human capital theory was used to point out the educational level as the main isolated factor to explain the increase in inequality. As Brazil grew at high rates, the demand for professionals with more years of formal education would have forced the income of those who met those requirements. The data show that this theory doesn’t hold.

Even in recent times, numbers calculated on the basis of tax data show stability. That is, there may have been redistribution of income to groups at the base of the pyramid for a short period without this altering the share of the richest 1%. Because of this, in the inequality table there is little change in the concentration of income and opportunities.

Amid this context of exclusion, violence and inequality, the Brazilian university is born without being touched by the Humboldt Reform of Higher Education in the 19th century, who introduced into the German institutions the methods of the experimental sciences and the dialogue with the productive sectors as part of their identity, something previously banished from the high culture – a characteristic that until

then was predominant, an inheritance of medieval universities, where practical knowledge wasn’t accepted.

It becomes then characteristic of a significant part of the Brazilian university scene the estrangement from social life, such as ivory towers where critical thinking is considered something exclusive to the wise and enlightened. Spaces populated by a majority of academics who spend their lives in the midst of hard worked publications and poorly read, with no social impact. Or entangled in highly specialized infertile discussions on very small areas of knowledge that only draw attention of a small number of researchers, also dedicated to these.

It is still possible to identify in many the colonial paradigm, which considers adequate and desirable to keep Higher Education accessible to few. As if meritocracy could happen naturally in this unequal context of opportunities and resources.

However, there is a worldwide movement that encourages the expansion of enrollments in Higher Education, within the perspective of education as a right for all and a basis for equal opportunities. It’s a phenomenon that’s in tune with the conception of the Modern State, liberal, democratic and social, "in which all transformed into sovereigns without distinction of class, claim, in addition to the rights of freedom, also the social rights, which are also rights of the individual".

An additional challenge that demands the expansion of supply and access to quality Higher Education is the rapid pace of the changes brought by digital technologies, in which the list of sectors touched by them expands and, unlike the typical innovations of the first industrial age, the benefits of technological change are no longer widely distributed.

The consequences on employment will be devastating, especially as the machines start to decide on their own, without human intervention. Due to automation, many jobs are at stake, especially those occupied by people with few years of formal education. The damage tends to be bigger where the occupational structure is more distant from the knowledge economy,

EDUCATION AND DIGITAL INNOVATION, FOR A NEW ETHICAL HORIZON IN THE FIGHT AGAINST INEQUALITY

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a situation in which Brazil finds itself by its economy predominantly based on the export of commodities.

History shows that the correlation between technical and scientific progress is directly related to economic progress, but without necessarily promoting social or environmental advances. Judging by the past 30 years, it has been observed that labor markets have undergone changes that are largely responsible for the re-concentration of wealth in developed countries, particularly in the United States.

Brazil has an enrollment rate of only 17.6%. It’s the percentage of the population of ages 18 to 24 in Higher Education, that is, the number of students enrolled from 18 to 24 years old in Higher Education divided by the total population of 18 to 24 years old. This is proportionately half of the Latin American neighbors.

And even in periods of economic and political crises a graduation degree seems to be the best antidote to unemployment, if compared to other portions of the population with lower level of formal education. In 2015 there was a 3.3% reduction in the total number of formal jobs compared to 2014. For employees with elementary education, the reduction was 5.9%. For employees with high school education, the drop came to 2.1%. As for employees with higher education, the drop was even lower, 0.9%. The

calculation took into account the final stock of formal jobs in 2014 and the difference in the monthly balance of formal jobs - number of admissions subtracted from the number of dismissals in the period.

If it is possible to identify a trend in Higher Education, is that Distance Education (DE) has expanded more than attendance classes. The number of people attending face-to-face courses in Brazil increased by 6.8%, comparing 2013 with 2014. In the DE courses the increase of people in the same period reached 41%. In 2014, the number of graduates in face-to-face courses was 841,000 students, 615,000 in the private network and 226,000 public universities, a figure of 0.8% higher than in 2013 when it registered 834,000 graduates. In DE, the number of graduates reached 190,000 with 174,000 in the private network and 16,000 in the public.

From the chart below it’s possible to verify that the number of enrollments in DE grew 66% from 2009 to 2015, double the increase of classroom courses. With the recent changes promoted by Decree No. 9,057, May 25, 2017 and by MEC Normative Regulation No. 11, June 20, 2017, the prediction is that the percentage of students enrolled in DE graduation courses will reach 30% of the total university population by the year 2020.

The DE is one of the initiatives to compose a response to two major challenges of Higher Education today. First, expand enrollment volume faster and with quality. And respond with innovation to the new ways that people have learned to inform, learn and disseminate knowledge in the context of digital innovation.

DIGITAL INNOVATION

Digital innovation is related to Information and Communication Technologies – ICT. It’s what has been driven productivity growth, still subject to an unequal diffusion of use throughout society, which generates a new type of exclusion.

In light of different definitions proposed in the literature it’s possible to understand digital innovation in the strict sense as the implementation of a new or significantly improved ICT, that is, within the category of information and communication technologies In a broader sense, it includes using ICTs to implement a significantly improved new product or process, a new marketing method, or a new way of organizing business practices, people management, or external relations.

Digital innovation can be disruptive and induce "creative destruction" of established ventures, markets and value networks, as well as challenge existing regulatory guidelines. These disruptive effects can be perceived as threatening both by individuals and by businesses and governments.

The fear of change combined with short-term thinking generally results in new technologies and digital innovations marketed for the first time by startup companies or new entrants from other segments. These can take advantage of starting without the legacy of a previously existing base and experimenting with creating a variety of presumably new business models.

That said, digital innovation isn’t always disturbing, even though it may be revolutionary, new and unexpected. It may only involve incremental improvements, for example, the use of e-commerce by a reseller doesn’t necessarily require drastic changes and is instead an evolutionary improvement of the established business model.

One of the factors that undermine or delay the ability to adopt digital innovation is difficult and costly access to hardware, software and Internet bandwidth infrastructures. Also, highlighted as a potential barrier is the increase in digital security risks perceived by potential adopters.

Of course, there is no technology or science that can claim absolute neutrality. And the risks are increased when the boundaries between the biological and the prostheses tend to be diluted, for example. Just as unfortunately, there is a growing crisis in education due to the number of entrepreneurs who are trying to exclude or reduce as much as possible the importance of the teacher, in a mistaken conception of the educational process and because they are committed to the primacy of profit at any price.

It is worth remembering the Hans Jonas's concept of 'heuristic of fear', which is not a paralyzing fear but one that invites us to take responsibility as the principle of action. The risks posed by technology threaten the present and the future, and thinking poorly is more persuasive than thinking properly and appears to us in a more explicit and evident way. Fear then becomes, to Jonas, the first obligation of an ethic of historical responsibility. Fundamental to deal with this new world.

Faced with a monumental and paradigmatic transformation that we face, DE is part of a movement that leads to digital innovation in education.

Learning with technology involves learning situations in which the teaching-learning relationship is established with the help of a device or software, such as a computer or the Internet. At some level, almost all learning involves technology. For example, in a traditional lecture, an instructor can use chalk and a chalkboard, thus employing an old but reliable technology. Similarly, a book is a form of technology, already in its accumulated 500 years of history.

An important and possible advantage, if properly used, of computer-based technology is that it allows multimedia presentation, with messages that include spoken or printed words and images such as animation, video, illustrations or photos. It also allows differentiated and personalized levels of interactivity and recovery of information that otherwise would be impossible.

59.611

727.961

1.393.752

4.163.733

5.080.056

6.633.545

0

1.000.000

2.000.000

3.000.000

4.000.000

5.000.000

6.000.000

7.000.000

2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015EAD 59.611 114.642 207.206 369.766 727.961 838.125 930.179 992.927 1.113.850 1.153.572 1.330.124 1.393.752Presencial 4.163.733 4.453.156 4.676.646 4.880.381 5.080.056 5.115.896 5.449.120 5.746.762 5.923.838 6.152.405 6.497.889 6.633.545

Chart 1 - Evolution of enrollments in Graduation by modality – 2014 to 2015

Source: INEP/MEC

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REFERENCE INTERVIEW

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There are three important principles of cognitive science research that must be taken into account when adopting teaching with technology:

Double Neural Trails: people have separate pathways in the brain for processing verbal and visual materials;

Limited capacity: people can process only small simultaneous amounts of material on each neural trail;

Active processing: meaningful learning occurs when students engage in appropriate cognitive process during learning, such as attending to relevant material, organizing it into a coherent representation and integrating it with relevant prior knowledge.

And when we talk about learning it is important

to differentiate the three types of memories that can

result from the teaching-learning process:

Sensory memory: contains all visual information received (visual sensory memory) and all perceived sounds (auditory sensory memory) for a short period of time;

Working memory: contains a limited number of selected words and images for further processing; and

Long-term memory: knowledge of deep meaning.

Table 1- Cognitive process required for active learning with technology

Process Descrição Tipo de Memória

SelectPay attention to relevant words and images

Leads the information from the ‘sensory memory’ to the 'working memory'

Organize

Arrange selected words and images into coherent mental representations

Handles the information on 'working memory'

Integrate

Connect verbal and image representations between themselves and with the previously constructed knowledge

Takes the information from ‘long-term memory' to the 'working memory'

Source: DUMONT, H.; INSTANCE, D.; BENAVIDES, F. (2010)

Research and data should be more widely disseminated as elements that contribute to the formulation of public policies intended to expand teaching with technology. Neuroscience and the relationships established in social networks can provide very useful and practical data to collaborate more effectively in the teaching-learning relationships.

There are several factors associated with the increased use of ICT in teaching. For example, participation in professional development activities involving individual or collaborative research, or the formation of a teacher network that makes it more likely that a teacher will use more often ICTs to work with students.

It is necessary to invest in teachers, educational managers and technical staff, as well as in schools and other learning spaces, to try to take Brazil out of self-imposed delay by those who have always occupied power. The DE collaborates with the democratization of access to higher education and will have higher or lower quality according to the institution that offers the courses. The same happens with face-to-face teaching.

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ALENCASTRO, L. F. O trato dos viventes: formação do Brasil

no Atlântico Sul. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000.

BOBBIO, N. A era dos direitos. Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 2004.

DUMONT, H.; INSTANCE, D.; BENAVIDES, F. (Orgs.). The

nature of learning: using research to inspire practice.

Paris: OCDE, 2010.

JONAS, H. O princípio responsabilidade: ensaio de

uma ética para a civilização tecnológica. Rio de Janeiro:

Contraponto; Ed. PUC-Rio, 2015.

MARREIRO, F. Série inédita brasileira mostra salto

da desigualdade no começo da ditadura. El País,

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Acesso em: 19 ago.2017.

OLIVEIRA, R. Para uma universidade tecnológica de alto

impacto econômico, social e cultural. In: GUERRINI, D.;

OLIVEIRA, R. (Orgs.). Universidades e desenvolvimento

regional: experiências internacionais e o caso das

universidades comunitárias do Rio Grande do Sul.

Lajeado, RS: Editora da Univates, 2016.

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Semesp, 2016.

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interpretação de sua evolução até 1969. Rio de Janeiro:

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With years of research and teaching, Romero Tori has gathered his experiences and studies in the literary work "Education without distance". The book addresses the distance between students, teachers and content that happens in face-to-face higher education.

The author points to the use of technology as a way to reduce geographical, social and educational distances. Another way to maintain the efficacy of this method is to invest in the pedagogical update of teachers so that they can keep up with the technological use of their students. In an interview for PoloUm, Tori points hybrid education as a way to reduce distances, to make students more disciplined and independent in the learning process.

What is the concept of Education without distance?

Romero Tori - This is not a new type of education. On the contrary, this idea put as title of my book, seeks to emphasize that, whatever the media and educational methodologies used, one must always seek to reduce the distances between student and teacher, student and content, students and their colleagues. The term “Distance Education - DE”, on the other hand, emphasizes the problem. The contraposition between DE x Face-to-face Education makes no sense, since it is possible and desirable to have the student present (even at a distance) in DE and students virtually absent in traditional classrooms. The flexibility and convergence of both modalities in the so-called "Hybrid learning" (Blended Learning) is a trend. In this context, the reduction of distances, including in the physical classroom, should always be pursued.

Are the networked world and the new technologies related to the Internet reorganizing the learning process?

Romero Tori - People learn in different ways and paces. The traditional classroom is extremely limiting, especially from the perspective of a young person who grew up in a connected, virtualized and interactive society. Limited in time and physical space; limited by not adapting

to the different needs of each student; limited to a certain number of students; limited by not enabling parallel interactions. The ease of access, communication and interaction of new technologies, interactive and networked, allows the breaking of all these limits, providing a real education without distance.

How to insert Brazilian education, with so many structural limits, in this new learning process?

Romero Tori - Today more people, even from poor communities and far from large centers, can access the Internet through mobile devices. Of course, the Internet is still expensive and slow in Brazil. Much need to be improved, but the current problem has more to do with culture than infrastructure. Brazilians still have difficult managing their own learning. There is also a culture that you only learn by going to a traditional school. The evasion indicators of distance education courses are still very high. However, the new generation – born and raised in the 21st century – should have fewer problems with the autonomous learning and the use of technology. They are getting use to search for information on the Internet instead of asking an adult. It's a generation that will make heavy use of apps to get around, to stay, to relate, to eat, to get dress, to have fun, to date and, why not, to learn too. There will be no barriers to this new generation. Education, as well as "without distance" will be "without limits".

ROMERO TORI (Dr. in Electrical Engineering and Professor at USP)

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Ano V nº 11 2017 ISSN 32317-532X

na práticaUEMA prepara docentes para atuar em cursos intermediados por tecnologias digitais

na práticaUEMA prepara docentes para atuar em cursos intermediados por tecnologias digitais

na práticaUEMA prepara docentes para atuar em cursos intermediados por tecnologias digitais

ENTREVISTAROMERO TORI

ENTREVISTAROMERO TORIProf. Dr. em Engenharia Elétrica e livre-docente/USP fala sobre Educação sem distância.Prof. Dr. em Engenharia Elétrica e livre-docente/USP fala sobre Educação sem distância.

ENTREVISTAROMERO TORIProf. Dr. em Engenharia Elétrica e livre-docente/USP fala sobre Educação sem distância.

UEMA lança livro sobre Tecnologias Educacionais durante o SIIESUEMA lança livro sobre Tecnologias Educacionais durante o SIIESUEMA lança livro sobre Tecnologias Educacionais durante o SIIES