Abstract:

The great challenge faced today in the university and education in general is to understand the profound change in the universe of knowledge, that enhanced by the technological revolution has significantly altered the forms of teaching and learning, as well as new Information and Communication technologies motivate educational institutions to create opportunities for democratizing knowledge.
The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), allows the implementation of various procedures such as exchanging information, sending materials for classes, job referral, discussion in forums, allowing assist the presence or distance teaching. With these benefits, this is an important tool in the interactive process of students of the PhD program in compliance with Brazilian intensive credits, during school holidays, with intensive classes in Argentina. From thisexperience, and perceived difficulties of the AVA used in the course admission before the first meeting in person, this study aimed to investigate the factors affecting the effectiveness of the platform using the quantitative and qualitative method. We conducted an open interview with the tutor responsible for the interaction between teachers and doctoral students, and we applied a questionnaire to 57 doctoralstudentsinEducation.
According to the interviewed tutor, his role is to advise the doctoral candidate, being the mediator between the student institution / PhD and teachers, in order to inform all PhD students about the organizational and institutional development of the course.
As indicated by the tutor of the platform of the university, not everyone is interested in participating in the interactive process that allows the platform to promote this teacher-student relationship.
As the respondent reports the difficulty of most students to use the resources of the platform, this is confirmed by the questionnaire in which 51% of the 57 students said they had no skills and knowledge about the use of the virtual environment before starting the course .
Since 61% of students had difficulty to access the activities and required readings posted on the platform before and during the course, of these, 46% said that the difficulties are resolved quickly with the help of the virtual tutor. Like, 61% of the students agreed that the strategies used by the tutor facilitates their interaction with the AVA.
About the need for prior training to use the platform, 93% believe that this may facilitate the interaction and the knowledge, and the interviewee agrees, saying that a in the platform an online course Moodle is available. Both doctoral students and teachers should do it. He added that teachers linked to the doctorate, only 26% are willing to use the virtual environment. The operation is done by sending the material by the teacher to the coordinator of the PhD program, that sends it to the tutor manage the information and make them available to doctoral students.
After verifying the results of the virtual platform how it is used in the doctoral program in education, it is perceived as an essential tool for the development of the interaction process between institution - faculty and doctoral students, however, this interaction does not occur properly due to the inability of the students and teachers in using it.

Keywords:

Virtual Learning Environment, virtual tutor, doctoral students.