| Resumo: |
Distance Education (DE) reveals specific characteristics to support teaching and learning processes mediated by technologies, such as the production of didactic materials in tune with the students' demands. In the Brazilian DE scenario, due to financial problems, in addition to the lack of digital inclusion, most students predominantly have access to printed didactic material, as occurs in the context of the distance technical courses of the DE Pernambuco Program. The motivation for this investigation is directly linked to the researcher's coexistence with actors from the face-to-face support center of the DE Pernambuco Program in the Arcoverde city, such as: students, teacher trainers, tutors and center coordination, who revealed the students' difficulties regarding the decision to leave the course, among them, for example, the language used in the production of the Program's didactic materials. The research contemplated the technical courses of the DE Pernambuco Program, specifically, those with higher and lower evasion rates, in order to investigate the relationship between language practices and evasion, taking into account the following guiding question: how do language practices presented in the didactic materials of the Interior Design and Administration Courses of the DE Pernambuco Program influence dropout rates of students? The general objective of the research was to analyze the teaching materials of the DE Pernambuco Program, based on the language practices employed and their possible impacts on the dropout rates of students in the context of Distance Education in vocational high school. As for the methodology, it is applied research, with a case study, prioritizing the qualitative approach. As a collection instrument, a mixed questionnaire was applied to students, with 83 responses being collected in order to understand the perception of students and graduates about the didactic materials of the courses. In the analysis of the teaching materials, we identified that, in the Administration course, the course with the lowest dropout rate, there was greater care with interactivity and hypertextuality, unlike the materials analyzed in the Interior Design course, the course with the highest dropout rate, according to the Program's data. One of the conclusions of the work was that the language practices present in the didactic materials are factors that can impact dropout from the distance learning course. The difficulty faced by students in handling didactic materials, whether printed or made available virtually, needs to be observed by multidisciplinary teams of DE courses, as well as by the management of the Program, so that there is continued training of the authors of these didactic materials of distance technical courses. In this sense, we also propose the creation of the research product, that is, a distance course, available in the virtual extension environment of UAEADTec/UFRPE, entitled “How to develop didactic materials for DE?”. The recurrent language practices in didactic materials created for DE deserve to be extensively investigated, considering the importance of didactic materials in supporting students' learning. |
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