Abstract:

The number of private and public institutes which offer distance modality courses – in Portuguese EAD) have grown significantly in Brazil after Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação (LDB) – a law on education patterns - was published in 1996 (Mugnol, 2009). At UnB (Brasília University), Nesprom (a UnB body involved to health promotion and distance education), with the Education Laboratory, EAD and Health Promotion (called LEPS) has been offering college degree and graduation courses subjects of the health area, by using a virtual learning tool (a.k.a. AVA), called MOODLE, based on a standard of electronic portfolios inserted in virtual learning tools, so named Moodle-folios, which use has been constituted as collective meeting points that allow processes and products registration, resulted from the activities that were developed in the disciplines. The AVA Moodle was chosen because this platform offers ideal virtual tools for students to gather, to share, to collaborate and to learn together (Paiva, 2010).

This new teaching dynamic shows its relevance when allowing the insertion of the student in a new virtual reality that, when favoring interactive Medias and collaborative learning, allows learning (Camacho, 2009).

The subject “Educative practices in Health Sciences” is offered by the Program of Health Science Graduation Course, that offers places in master and doctor degrees for various health professionals and similar. During its path the subject has three present meetings, in which the teaching-learning process is discussed and debated. The first group meeting class is based in welcoming students, registering them on Moodle platform and its utilization; the second is related to how the course is working out with the students, beyond a magnum class about integrative review (a tool for the discipline final evaluation), that is a review of an article construction, joining the student’s profession and his or her experience with EAD; the third meeting happens at the end of the subject – when the closure of it happens – with the students’ reviews presentation.

Since its elaboration, the subject has a low or none level of evasion, as it occurred in its last offers. Through our experience in tutoring lived in various college degrees, we noticed that graduation students are much more committed in doing their activities and in staying in the course/subject than the others from college. This difference may be related to many factors, such as: academic growing, fail worrying, and getting off the program by students, which is very important for their professional and academic careers. In the end of the discipline, we saw some students who have never been in touch with distance education being able to expose amazing ideas and experiences with EAD in their professions, which could never happen if they did not have studied the subject.

References:
[1] Mugnol M. Distance education in Brazil: concepts and foundations. Rev. Diálogo Educ., Curitiba, v. 9, n. 27, p. 335-349, maio/ago. 2009
[2] Paiva VMO. Virtual learning environments: epistemological implications. Educ Rev. 2010;26(3):353-70.
[3] Camacho ACLF. Analysis of national publications about distance education in nursing. Rev Bras Enferm. 2009;62(4):588-93.

Keywords:

Distance Education, Interdisciplinarity, Health Science.