LOCAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH DISTANCE EDUCATION: AN ANALYSIS OF LOCAL SUPPORT CENTERS DISTRIBUTION TO IMPROVE HIGHER EDUCATION ACCESS IN BRAZIL

Distance Education has been used in all over the world as a possibility of breaking geography frontiers and take education to the furthest and less privileged places. Brazil's Open University has been created in 2006 for this purpose. Its central objectives are to capacitate professors and managers to act in the Brazilian Education, democratizing the access as a strategy to ameliorate the Brazilian results of Demographic Index of Basic Education (IDEB) – in Brazil estimated at 3.8, in contrast to the estimated IDEB average of developed countries being 6.0. As a participant of Brazil's Open University, a Federal University in the South of Brazil offered 12 undergraduate/certificate programs with a total of 11464 enrolled students and 60 local support centers since 2007. Face-to-face classes occur in local support centers distributed in many cities of the country, where enrolled students have support to develop their mandatory activities as established in educational law. The distribution of this local support centers is an important issue in the system, once their localization can determinate the geography coverage they will have, providing more access to countryside people. In this context, we analyzed the requirements for local support centers implementation with focus in the Human Development Index (IDH), Basic Education Development Index (IDEB) and geographic location of them through a survey composed by the centers of Santa Catarina's State. It was concluded that their distribution is deficient. There are areas of the State with lower development indexes where no center was implemented. In contrast, the central areas and metropolitan centers, which traditionally offer many higher education institutions and opportunities, count with abounding centers and courses. Through the analysis, we concluded there is not a fair local support centers distribution considering educational and socioeconomic indexes related to Brazil's Open University purposes.