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The Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
in Education: the Brazilian Experience
Espartaco Madureira Coelho
Lagos, Nigeria – August, 2005
“Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be
free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages.
Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and
professional education shall be made generally available
and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on
the basis of merit.” - The 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, Article 26.
I - INTRODUCTION
Despite a decade of large investment in ICTs to benefit education in Brazil, and
increasing use of ICTs in education in developing countries, important gaps remain in the
current knowledge base. In addition, there appears to be a dearth of useful resources attempting
to translate what is known to work – and not work – in this field for policymakers and donor
staff working on education issues in developing countries, especially those issues related to
achieve universal primary education.
While much of the rhetoric for using ICTs to benefit education has focused on
ICTs' potential for bringing about changes in the teaching-learning paradigm, in practice, ICTs
are most often used in education in less developed countries to support existing teaching and
learning practices with new and often quite expensive tools (sic).
While impact on student achievement is still a matter of reasonable debate, a
consensus seems to argue that the introduction and use of ICTs in education can be a useful tool
to help promote and enable educational reform, and that ICTs are both important motivational
tools for learning and can promote greater efficiencies in education systems and practices.
II - CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BRAZILIAN EDUCATION SYSTEM
A peculiarity of Brazilian education is its extreme diversification and
decentralization. Brazil is a federative republic made up of 26 states and the Federal District.
The units of the federation are in turn sub-divided into a total of about 6.000 municipalities.
The whole education system, with the higher education, is mainly public. There
are today in Brazil all levels of education, 60 million learners, about a third of the total
population. This number is equal to pratically the total populations, added together, of
Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. Public sector schools provide completely free education to 90%
of the 55 million pupils in basic education – early childhood, primary and secondary – a figure
equal to the total population of Venezuela and Peru.
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The new National Educational Guidelines and Framework (Lei de Diretrizes e
Bases da Educação Nacional – LDB), passed in December, 1996, redefined the roles and
responsibilities of each system of education (federal, state and municipal). It gives greater
autonomy to the school, making its curriculum more flexible and encouraging teacher training –
it states that by the year 2007 teaching should be an all-graduate profession – the new law
created the necessary environment for carrying out the significant changes in the country's
educational landscape.
Compulsory prymary education, from 1
st
to 8
th
grades, along with crèches, pre-
school and secondary education, has always been the responsibility of states and municipalities.
central government's role at these levels of teaching, is normative, setting out the broad lines of
the system, and redistributive and supplementary when it deals with aid and financial
arrangements aimed at decreasing social and regional inequalities. The Union is only directly
responsible for maintaining higher education and secondary level technical institutions.
Since the LDB was passed a general process of municipalisation of basic
education and state control of secondary education has been launched. In 1997, there were 18
million pupils in state basic education schools and 12 million in the municipal system. In 1999,
the municipal and state system of education were equal in number, with 16 million young
people in each. Today, secondary education, which has been expanding on average at a rate of
14% since 1996 and 1999, is increasingly concentrated in state systems. Preliminarly data from
the year 2000 School census show that the expansion of 5,4% in enrolments took place in the
state network (7,9%), while all the other systems showed a fall: federal -10,2%, municipal
-4,9% and private – 4,2%. This changes is in accord with the National Education Guidelines
and Framework Law which allocated the provision of secondary education to the states.
The whole emphasis of the Federal Government is concentrated today in
promoting, from the bottom to the top of the education system, the expansion with quality of
educational opportunities, specially for those of school age, while also ensuring opportunities
for reentry on the part of those who had no access to school at the appropriate age.
The most important aspect in basic education was to enroll children aged 7 to 14
and to keep them in school, guaranteeing them quality education. The government's second
objective, after universalizing access, was to ensure success in school, represented by pupil's
progress to the end of the final grade within the specified time period, and ensure that of
necessity involved the improvement of teaching quality.
Attention must be also be given, however, in addition to prioritising basic
education, to measures involving the reform and diversification of secondary and further
education, to the training and qualification of teachers and to the expansion and improvement of
higher education.
Together with this, complementary compensatory programmes – some of which
are the widest-ranging in the world – have been developed with a view to making up for the
historic heritage of inequality in Brazilian society. Standing out along these are the programmes
for distributing free school meals and books at primary level, of income support for the poorest
families with children in school, of educational loans for students entering higher education,
and of support for the education systems in the North and Northeast, that also are aimed at
compensating for regional and economic inequalities and at contributing to the effort at social
inclusion that are currently in force in Brazil.
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The government's education programme, based in the search for equality of
opportunity, has included, together with the principles of universalisation, quality and
decentralisation, community participation in schools management and greater social control of
public expenditure and of results. To this end, the traditional system of allocating federal
resources to other federal bodies by means of negotiated agreements, has been gradually
replaced by automatic transfer mechanisms based in general and transparent criteria. The
bureaucratic instruments of inspection and evaluation have been replaced by community
participation in representative organs of supervision and control.
School Registration in Basic Education – Brazil – 2003/2004
Level and
Modality of
Education
School
Registration
2003
School
Registration
2004
Variation (%)
Public Sector
2004
Public Sector
Participation
(%)
Crèches 1.237.558 1.348.078 8,9% 844.282 68,2%
Pre-school 5.155.676 5.533.180 7,7% 4.070.781 79,0%
Fundamental
Education
34.438.749 34.012.151 -1,2% 30.683.857 89,1%
Secondary
Education
9.072.942 9.166.835 1,0% 8.056.000 88,8%
Special
Education
358.898 371.442 3,5% 136.770 38,1%
Adult
Education
4.403.436 4.576.117 3,9% 4.330.617 98,3%
Total 54.667.259 55.027.803 0,7% 48.122.307 88,0%
School Registration in Higher Education – Brazil – 1998/2003
Year Public Private Total
1998 804.729 1.321.229 2.125.958
1999 832.022 1.537.923 2.369.945
2000 887.026 1.807.219 2.694.245
2001 939.225 2.091.529 3.030.754
2002 1.051.655 2.428.258 3.479.913
2003 1.137.119 2.750.652 3.887.771
III - SPECIFIC INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES TOOLS
IN EDUCATION
Recent work at “World Bank infoDev: the Information for Development
program” created a series of “Knowledge Maps” of what is known – and what isn’t – about ICT
use in education. One of these maps reveals what is known about which ICTs are most useful to
benefit education. Below, we have the conclusions of this work:
1) The Internet is not widely available in most less developed countries; radio
and TV are - Broadcast technologies such as radio and television have a much greater
penetration than the Internet throughout much of the developing world, and the substantial gap
is not expected to be closed soon.
2) Radio and TV can have high start-up costs, and reinforce existing
pedagogical styles - Educational initiatives that utilize radio and television typically have quite
high initial start-up/capital costs, but once they are up and running, on-going maintenance and
upgrade costs are much lower. One-to-many broadcast technologies like radio and television
(as well as satellite distribution of electronic content) are seen as less ‘revolutionary’ ICTs in
education, as their usage is seen as reinforcing of traditional instructor-centric learning models,
unlike computers, which many see as important tools in fostering more learner-centric
instructional models.
3) Radio instruction has been used widely and is reasonably well studied - Radio
instruction in formal education has been well studied, especially the links between the use of
radio in combination with school-based educational resources and a variety of pedagogical
practices.
4) TV has been used with success in a few places - Television has been utilized
successfully as a mechanism for reaching out-of-school youth in a number of countries,
especially in Latin America and China, and the results of such projects have been widely
disseminated.
5) In some cases, where markets have been liberalized, ICTs are used to
distribute educational content regionally within a country - Market liberalization has in many
countries allowed for the development of locally- (as opposed to centrally-) controlled
distribution channels that utilize ICTs (like radio and the Internet, and to a lesser extent
television) to create and broadcast educational content more targeted to the needs of specific
communities, and as a result have a greater flexibility to employ local languages.
6) Computer-Aided Instruction (CAI) is not highly regarded by experts and in
OECD countries, but still receives much interest in less developed countries - The usefulness of
CAI, in which computers are seen as simple replacements for teachers, has been largely
discredited, although there appears to still be great interest in CAI in many less developed
countries where computers are being introduced.
7) It is unclear where to place computers to make sure they are used most
efficiently - There is very little research on the most appropriate placement of computers in
schools, or in the community, used to achieve various learning objectives.
8) Multi-channel learning is a useful concept - The emerging practice of ‘multi-
channel learning’, which focuses on enriching the educational experience by engaging all
resources that are available to help effect incremental change by coordinating the various ways
to connect learners with information, knowledge, and stimulation, and to mediate those
interactions, provides valuable insight into how blended learning approaches can be delivered
and tailored in areas of great resource scarcity.
9) Satellite is much hyped, but under-studied - While satellite broadcasting of
electronic educational resources is thought to hold much promise, there are few case studies of
successful implementation of satellite broadcasting to small less developed countries.
10) New Internet technologies hold promise, but are not yet operational -
Emerging Internet technologies, especially recent and emerging wireless protocols (including
802.11, and shortly WiMax), are thought to hold much promise for providing connectivity to
remoter areas, but projects utilizing such technologies are for the most part in pilot or planning
stages, and face many regulatory hurdles.
11) Mobile Internet centres (vans, etc.) are being deployed as a way to reach
rural areas - A number of educational initiatives utilizing mobile Internet centres have been
piloted in the past decade, but little cost and impact data has emerged from such projects.
12) Community telecentres are a hot topic, but successful, replicable models
have not yet emerged - Community telecentres (sometimes based in schools) have be touted as
important tools to provide access to learners (including teachers engaged in personal enrichment
and professional development opportunities) to ICTs outside of formal school settings.
13) The use of handheld devices is just now receiving serious widespread
attention - Little research has been done on uses of handheld devices (including personal digital
assistants and mobile phones) in education, especially in less developed countries.
14) ‘Free software’ holds promise, but costs and impact are still not well
documented - The use of ‘free’ and 'open source' software is widely touted as a cost effective
alternative to the uses of proprietary software (especially those purveyed by Microsoft), but
research in this area is largely advocatory in nature.
IV - THE BRAZILIAN EXPERIENCE
Brazil has a daunting challenge to face in its effort at making education a lever
to development. Technology and particularly ICTs can help.
There is evidence of the positive contribution communication technologies can
make to widen access to education and improve quality of learning materials at costs that are
significantly smaller than more traditional ways of teaching or learning, when large and
dispersed populations are to be served. The use of ICTs has also been proved to increase
motivation and independent learning within classroom environment. Teachers are one group to
be best benefited by the adoption of ICTs as a tool for constant upgrading, a source of
information for class preparation and as a tool exchange of information and knowledge.
UNESCO and the brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC) had played an
important role in support of all possible ways of extending good quality education to largest
number of people possible. However, in the case of ICT, it is sure to draw attention to the fact
that a mix of various technologies is probably the best way to meet society's needs in education.
The MEC also stresses the fact that no technology can produce the desired educational effects if
it is not put at the service od pedagogical objectives and educational methodologies. There are
also strong conditions for innovative education to help meet developmental goals.
The basis for a proper combination of technologies in education is the
recognition that one has to mobilize all available technological resources towards educational
ends; that the learning process includes both interative and indeoendent activities; that the
human contact of teachers, tutors and fellow students are for educational purposes; and that
books can be enriched by other media to become central building blocks of knowledge.
UNESCO and the MEC had stimulated new experiences in the application of
technologies to education and to the classroom learning environment or education at a distance,
with informal education or in the various modalities of lifelong, continuous adult education.
This paper contains a synthesis of the main activities developed by UNESCO and the MEC in
support of ICT applications in Brazilian education.
Brazil has made use of non-traditional means of formal education for more than
a century, but new ICT have gradually entered teaching and learning activities the country since
the late 1990s.
Classroom education is still greatly dominant in education delivery, but public
and private universities in Brazil have since offered distance educational courses at graduate
level, particularly for majors in child development.
The most significant distance education resource is printed material, but new
technologies are quickly penetrating this modality of education. This is quite apparent in the
continuous education offered at corporate universities, some of which mobilize dedicated
broadband communication facilities for this purpose.
Internet is already a media adopted by many public and private universities in
their educational activities, while at the basic level of education – fundamental and secondary –
the National Program for Computer Science in Education (ProInfo) of the MEC and specific
State government programs have extended computer and Internet access to public schools.
While access to the Internet in public schools is still lagging behind, the situation
in private is different: TV sets and aerial for the reception of educational transmissions by
private and public organizations are present in a large number of public schools and
transmissions are received in all Brazilian municipalities. Radio-school transmissions are a
reality for many of the teachers and school-aged children in the Amazon and in the Mid-West
regions of the country.
1) THE IN-SERVICE TEACHER TRAINING PROGRAMME (ProFormação)
http://www.mec.gov.br/seed/proform/
The In-Service Teacher Training Programme is a distance course, in secondary
level, with qualification for the teaching in the Normal modality, carried through for the MEC
in partnership with the States and Municipalities. It is a 2 years course, destined to the
professors who, without specific formation, are teaching in the four initial series (fundamental
education), classrooms of adult literacy, or adult and young education, in the public schools of
the country. The initial objective was to provide a basic formation to a group of 90.000 teachers
who were working in the North and Northeast regions of the country.
ProFormação also participates of projects of technical cooperation agreement in
the distance to share the experience acquired for the SEED - Secretariat of education in the
formation of in-service teachears training. Currently it develops projects with São Tomé and
Príncipe and Timor East.
Group
(conclusion)
State Municipalities Formed Teachers
Pilot
(2000)
MT 118 1.120
MS 28 203
Group I
(2001)
AC 23 1.634
CE 74 3.013
GO 156 1.853
PB 102 1.358
PE 106 1.712
PI 76 2.179
RO 34 1.109
SE 52 1.398
Group II
(2002)
AL 35 615
AM 25 1.003
BA 174 3.627
MA 50 1.935
TO 54 660
Group
(conclusion)
State Municipalities Formed Teachers
Group III
(2004)
AL 16 206
BA 57 774
CE 35 961
GO 35 263
MA 38 1.593
MT 30 386
PB 34 641
PE 13 64
PI 51 749
RO 23 239
SE 20 189
Group IV
(2006)
AL 10 171
AM 10 434
BA 10 282
CE 19 625
MA 13 576
PE 10 185
PI 21 275
RO 23 331
RR 6 463
SE 12 104
GO 1 126
TOTAL 33.056
2) THE TV-SCHOOL PROGRAMME (TV Escola)
http://portal.mec.gov.br/seed/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=134&Itemid=271
The TV-School is an dedicated educational channel operated by the Secretariat
for Distance Education of the Ministry of Education (SEED/MEC), directed to the qualification,
update and perfectioning of teachers of fundamental and secondary levels of the public schools.
It's based in a satellite broadcasting of electronic educational resources which transmits a
programming brought up to date during 16 hours per day, every day of the week.
This programme aims to offer to 60.000 schools all over the country educational
and support programs to help the work of teachers and in-service teacher training.
The expansion of the MEC's TV-School is today one of the most immediate
tools to address the lack of teacher training in public schools and consequently, to enhance
educational results in Brazil. A technical cooperation agreement between the SEED/MEC and
UNESCO facilitates the process of selection and production of content to the TV-School
Programme.
3) THE NATIONAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROGRAMME IN
EDUCATION (ProInfo)
http://portal.mec.gov.br/seed/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=136&Itemid=273
The National Information Technology Programme in Education (ProInfo) was
created in 1997 to promote the use of the ICTs as a tool of pedagogical enrichment in
fundamental and secondary public education. This ProInfo has, as one of its main objectives,
the installation of computer science laboratories in a partnership of the SEED/MEC with the
States and Municipalities Secretariats.
In order to promote the implementation of these ICTs laboratories, were created
the Educacional Technologies Centers (Núcleos de Tecnologia Educacional – NTE), where
teachers, formed in courses of specialization in the area of technology, act as multiplyers,
enabling the teachers of the schools benefited for the programme to use the resources of the
ICTs in their classrooms.
Until the moment these are the main results of the ProInfo:
1) 4.931 laboratories in schools of 1.853 municipalities;
2) benefited 250.000 teachers and 7 million students;
3) 378 NTEs installed; and
4) 3.750 schools connected to the Internet (2.361 are broad band).
4) THE ELECTRONIC NATIONAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY PROGRAMME
IN EDUCATION (e-ProInfo)
http://www.eproinfo.mec.gov.br/
e-ProInfo is a learning environment that uses the Internet's collaborative
technologies and allows a total free (for Brazilian public organizations) development of diverse
types of actions, as distance courses, virtual groups administration, complement research
projects and other forms of distance support that can support the process teach-learning.
From 2003 until now the e-ProInfo platform allowed the accomplishment of 570
courses that had the participation of more than 36.000 pupils.
Area Registered Institutions
Basic Education 22
Higher Education 40
Technological Education 22
Corporative Education 20
TOTAL 104
5) THE PUBLIC DOMAIN WEBSITE
http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/
This digital library was created in November 2004, to promote the global access
to the literary, artistic and scientific works (under the form of texts, sounds, images and videos),
already in public domain or that they have its spreading duly authorized, contributing for the
development of the education and the culture, and improving the construction of the social
conscience, the citizenship and the democracy in Brazil.
The portal was developed in a free software platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL
and Java), and has an average of 3 million hits (server requests) per month.
Registered
Works
Texts Images Songs Videos TOTAL
28 July, 2005 5.686 2.945 112 19 8.762
6) THE INTERNATIONAL VIRTUAL EDUCATION NETWORK FOR SCIENCE AND
MATHEMATICS LEARNING – IVEN (RIVED)
http://rived.proinfo.mec.gov.br/
Educational software is a booming market segment around the world. In
developing countries, local development of educational software is part of technological
development policy and offers an excellent opportunity for international collaborative work.
From the every beginning, UNESCO and MEC had participated in the
constitution process of the International Virtual Education Network for Science and
Mathematics Learning – IVEN (RIVED, in Spanish and Portuguese). This was a pilot project of
international cooperation in education in Latin America implemented with start-up funding
from UNESCO, resources from the Inter-American Development Bank and contributions from
the government of Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina and Peru.
The project included: planning of teaching; learning activities; production of
multimedia instructional material; training of participants and constitution of a network of
information distribution and evaluation of the program and of learning. The resulting
multimedia products have great curricular flexibility, allowing teachers to make use of a library
of “educational objects” in support of their daily teaching. Presently, various university groups
are engaged in the development of innovative educational software throught a cooperation
agreement between UNESCO and the Secretariat for Distance Education of the Ministry of
Education (SEED/MEC).
7) GRANTS FOR DISTANCE EDUCATION DISSERTATIONS AND THESIS (PAPED)
http://200.130.6.181/site/index.php
The Support to the Research in Distance Education Programme (PAPED) is
another direction of UNESCO and MEC support to innovative activities in education is the
incentive to debate and think over the variety of practices in the country, both in classroom and
distance education.
Since 1997 and in cooperation with the Secretariat for Distance Education of the
Ministry of Education (SEED/MEC), UNESCO has supported the preparation of doctorate
thesis and masters dissertations on topics of interest to distance education and submitted them to
various academic institutions in Brazil.
Until the moment around 39 doctorate thesis and 73 master's dissertations in
subjects concerning distance education have been concluded with a grant from UNESCO and
SEED/MEC.
The dominant subjects of these studies reflect the centrality of the debate on
epistemology implications and pedagogy strategies of introducing ICT in distance learning as
well as thye complexity of achieving effective, collaborative work in virtual space.
Candidates to the grant have been selected by an Evaluation Committee
composed of scientific consultants from the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education
Personnel (CAPES) and specialists in distance education nominated by SEED/MEC and
UNESCO.
8) THE LITERATE BRAZIL PROGRAMME
In accordance with the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE),
Brazil has more than 33 million functional illiterates (people with less than four years of study)
and 16 million people with more than 15 years that still are illiterate. The Literate Brazil
Programme was created in 2003 to make possible the literacy of millions of adults and young
people that do not had access to the school in the adequate age. The programme already took
care or is in process of formation of more than 3,7 million adults and young and has about
165.000 tutors in 4.000 cities. Up to 2006, the goal is to benefit 10 million adults and young,
contributing significantly to reduce the index of illiteracy in Brazil.
In order to to reduce the bureaucracy, the programme is based on the direct
transfer of resources for states and municipalities; and to assure the quality of education, the
resources for the formation of the tutors were extended of R$ 80 to R$ 120 monthly.
V - CONCLUSIONS
1) Impact:
a) The impact of ICT use on learning outcomes is unclear, and open to much debate;
b) There is an absence of widely accepted standard methodologies and indicators to
assess impact of ICTs in education;
c) There is a disconnect between the rationales most often put forward to advance the
use of ICTs in education (to introduce new teaching and learning practices and to foster 21
st
century thinking and learning skills) and their actual implementation (predominantly for use in
computer literacy and dissemination of learning materials).
2) Costs:
a) There is very little useful data on the cost of ICT in education initiatives, especially
those attempting to assess Total Cost of Ownership, nor guidance on how to conduct cost
assessments.
3) Current Implementations of ICTs in Education:
a) ICTs are being widely used in education, and interest in their use appears to be
growing, even in the most challenging environments in developing countries.
4) Policy - Lessons Learned and Best Practices:
a) There are emerging best practices and lessons learned in a number of areas, but with a
few exceptions (notably on ‘schoolnet’ development and general lessons learned), they have not
been widely disseminated nor packaged into formats easily accessible to policy makers in
developing countries, and have not been explicitly examined in the context of the education-
related more developed countries.
VI - BIBLIOGRAFY
BRASLAVSKY, Cecilia and WERTHEIN, Jorge (editors). Education, Economy and
Development: Learning from successful cases. Brasília: UNESCO, 2003.
Educação: caminho para o desenvolvimento. Brasília: Ministério da Educação, 2004
Education and Development in Brazil: 1995 – 2000. Brasília: UNESCO, 2000.
Education and Technology for Development. Brasília: UNESCO, 2004.
Education for Human Development. Brasília: UNESCO, Ayrton Senna Institute, 2005.
Knowledge Maps - ICTs in Education. infoDev: the Information for Development program,
World Bank, 2005.
Available at: http://www.infodev.org/section/programs/mainstreaming_icts/education/
knowledgemaps_education
TEDESCO, Juan Carlos (org.). Educação e Novas Tecnologias: esperança ou certeza?
Brasília: UNESCO, 2004.
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