Distance education challenges to higher education: new reflections about the role of evaluation

Analyzing Distance Education (DE) related rules and its insertion in consolidated universities, one could find, in 2003, its marginalization as a parallel world, more and more difficult to be evaluated in terms of its intentionalities and impact on Higher Education. After three years, there comes a new opportunity to discuss this subject with the approval in 2005 of DE regulation. DE current situation requires an investigation on the growing challenge that it represents to Higher Education System as a whole. With this purpose in mind, an attempt was made, from a paper sent to ANPED, to go deep to the main aspects of DE '' explosion '' in Brazilian Higher Education in the last three years and look through the controversial issues which become prominent in the examined data and discussions on legal documents already approved or that are about to be approved. As conclusion, one propose to study how appropriate are current evaluation taxonomy for courses, programs and Higher Education Institutions to investigate issues like: (a) quality and comprehension of quality criteria utilized by MEC when fulfilling its regulation, supervision and evaluation functions; (b) quantity and quality of available data to fulfill these functions; (c) how far can regulation act without suffocating the system.