Contribuições dos facilitadores EaD em eventos síncronos: percepções dos graduandos da UNIVESP

Abstract

Learning resulting from interactions mediated by media resources has its characteristics, using new communication elements and virtual environments increasingly adapted to the contents and activities proposed by educational institutions. However, they still need human mediators, generating actions that influence the quality of this learning, linking the information presented to the affective and cognitive apprehensions of thousands of students who are in distance learning. Graduate students from USP, UNESP and UNICAMP institutions, acting as tutors and named “Learning Facilitators”, mediate the teaching and learning processes at the Virtual University of the State of São Paulo (UNIVESP). In the research carried out to compose this work, using a free association questionnaire and semi- structured interviews, we collected from students of the undergraduate courses of Language Degree, Pedagogy and Computer Engineering at UNIVESP, words that characterized the actions of the "Learning Facilitators" that influenced their learning on a synchronous meeting, popularly called “Lives”. The most mentioned words: “didactics”, “explanation”, “help”, “clarity”, and “doubts”, were re-presented to five students who volunteered to participate in semi-structured interviews and provided the senses and meanings for these words, in the context of Lives. As a result, the students participating in the research stated that the Facilitators have "didactics", referring to the term in the sense of "presenting the subjects with clarity, objectivity, and knowledge", and that they need their help since the distance learning it's a lonely activity. They stated that the facilitators represent a bridge between them and the professor-author, pointing to a distance, characteristic of asynchronous video lessons. Thus, the actions of the Facilitators are perceived by undergraduate students at UNIVESP as elements of affective and interactionist proximity, contributing to the learning of content and mitigating possible losses that may be caused by the transactional distance, characteristic of this teaching modality.