Emundus/Brazil

1. Introduction

Brazil is the only country in Latin America where Portuguese is the official language. It is a country of equality and inequality. With over 202 million people, Brazil is the 5th most populous country in the world in territorial area (covering the equivalent to 47% of South America) and the 7th largest economy on the planet. Being such a big country, whose population is unevenly distributed in its territory, the task of providing high quality education to all its citizens is a challenge to be faced.

In the last 15 years, Brazil has registered advances in education - as announced in the Document of the World Bank in 2010. The document points out the continuous public politics and the effective lasting-long reforms, as factors that have contributed to these advances. However, there is much more to be done to guarantee the country´s progress, in terms of economical, educational and social equalities.

'''2. Country demographics '''

Education in Brazil is regulated by the Federal Government, through the Ministry of Education, which defines the principles and rules for the organization of educational programs in the country. Local governments are responsible for establishing state and educational programs following the guidelines for using the funding supplied by the Federal Government.

The Brazilian tertiary education system is not compulsory but very heterogeneous. Higher education is offered by private and public universities, colleges, higher institutes and educational technology centers.

Public institutions are the most renowned and the only ones that appear in the rankings of the best universities in the world. Universidade de São Paulo (USP) ranks 127th and Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) 215th  to mention those which rank among the 250 top ones. Both universities are located in the Southeast of the country.

To pursue higher education in Brazil, it is mandatory that students have secondary education. In addition, students must pass a competitive entrance examination (Vestibular) for their specific course of interest and study. Similarly to Vestibular, Enem (National Examination of Secondary Education) is another type of higher education entrance examination adopted by a number of public universities in the country.

Most of the growth at the tertiary level has been absorbed by private institutions which enroll almost three quarters of the total student population. Educational attainment rates in Brazil have been rising over the past decade, according to the OECD Educational Glance 2013. As registered in the document, tertiary attainment rates stand at 9% among 55-64 year-olds and 13% among 25-34 year-olds. To improve equity and opportunities for tertiary education, the Government of Brazil has launched the ProUni program to help place academically qualified low income students into private education institutions. Also attempting to give underprivileged Brazilian students better chances of getting free higher education and, thus, access to better jobs, a new law was approved in 2012. Lei das Cotas n. 12.711/2012 (a polemic law) garantees 50% of the places in Brazil´s federal universities and institutes to students coming from public schools, low-income families and who are Afro or indigenous decent.

Due to Brazil´s extension and the number of people to be educated, distance learning (Ensino a Distância - EAD) in higher education started to be seen as an important solution. The 2011 Higher Education Census has confirmed the tendency of growth of distance learning programs in Brazil. Considering the academic background, the enrollments of authorized courses were mainly in the higher level, with a larger incidence in licentiate´s degrees, technological courses and bachelor´s degrees.

'''2.1 Connectivity '''

Despite the fact that technological infrastructure is still a problem in Brazil and the existing regional and socioeconomic disparties in ICT acess, data shows that lhe number of Internet users has been increasing along the years in the country.

In 2012, Internet users (older than 10 years of age) reached the milestone of 80.9 million people, according to surveys carried out by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br). The surveys also unveil that new technologies are practically universal in small, medium and large scale businesses. The Southeast remains the region with the highest proportion of connected households.

According to Forbes , 23.3% of Brazilians use their phones to access the internet and Reuters forcasted that as of the end of 2013, Brazil would be home to the largest mobile phone market in Latin America.

In schools, in general, even though ICTs is encouraged by the government, the use of computers and the Internet is rather concentrated in the computer labs rather than in the classrooms. The barrier to all students´ and teachers´ inclusion in the universe of information and communication technology still persists in the country.

'''3. State of the Art of Open Education in Brazil '''

“Despite appearing in the literature since 2006 and the increasing actions to raise awareness of OER […], the Open Education Resources movement still has a long way to go in Brazil” (Inamorato, 2011). According to Inamorato, by involving all private and public education sectors in the implementation of specific national policies relevant to OER it will be possible to have a significant impact on widening participation of OER in Education in the whole country.

To increase access to higher education, mainly of teachers, the Open University of Brasil (Sistema Universidade Aberta do Brasil, UAB) was created in 2006, mostly based on distance education. Given the big extension of Brazil and its huge population, Open Education may contribute to better the quality of life of the people by democratizing access to free of charge or minimal cost public education. Considering the main Brazilian government goals for national education for the next decade, OER can help bring about (as summarized by Inamorato) the following:

- Additional extra-curricular basic and secondary educational activities using ICTs;

- Encouragement of the use of tutored and self-study OER programs;

- Career development opportunities for teachers;

- Collaboratively written textbooks for public access;

- Collaboratively produced pedagogical and training materials for teachers and students;

- Broader participation in higher education.

3.1 OER initiatives

The Brazilian Project on OER (Project REA.br) was launched in 2008 with the visit of an international commission to the Ministry of Education and a series of events of awareness raising to implement and support OER projects, policies and mandates, in São Paulo and Brasilia. The REA project - founded by Carolina Rossini in 2008 - tries to adequate to Brazilian reality and perspectives the international discussion on OER and on Open Education. However, this would not be possible without the support and contribution of an enthusiastic community: REA-Brazil Community, which gathers educators, scientists, engineers, technology professionals, journalists, lawyers and those who believe in OER and Open Education. The project has partnership and institutional support of Digital Institute, Law School of Fundação Getúlio Vargas in São Paulo , UNESCO, among others. The project is financed by the Open Society Foundation[http:// www.soros.org] and has partnership with several project and initiatives which focus on OER.

Besides the REA project, many other initiatives related to OER and Open Education have been tried out and implemented in Brazil along the years.

'''3.1.1 Cases of international collaboration in OER '''

There have been interesting cases of international collaboration with Brazil that contributed to the sharing and dissemination of best practices in OER. In 1997, Brazil set an agreement with the United States of America to develop technology for pedagogical use. Two years later, in 1999, was launched one of the first initiatives in Brazil to provide free digital learning materials through the web - the Interactive Virtual Education Network - Rede Interativa Virtual de Educação (RIVED) , as a result of a partnership between Secretary of Secondary Education and Technology (today SEB) and Secretary for Distance Education (SEED). In 2004, the process of production learning objects was transferred from SEED to the universities, giving rise to RIVED/Virtual Factory (Fábrica Virtual). RIVED sponsors multidisciplinar teams at universities for research and production of learning objects. All contents produced are public and are gradually being licensed through Creative Commons, which will allow copy and distribution of the materials, once credit to the authors is given. RIVED presents itself as the Brazilian counterpart in the Latin American Network of Educational Portals (RELPE), whose access to the educational contents produced by the participant countries can be shared. Besides Brazil, Peru and Venezuela also participate in the project.

The Open University UK, by means of Open Learn and Olnet  projects, has supported several collaboration initiatives regarding OER in Brazil, as the cases with Unisul Virtual  and another one with Fluminense Federal University (UFF). While Unisul Virtual is an example of cross-nation reuse and sharing of open education resources, Fluminense Federal University´s example helped to examine different pedagogical perspectives on OER in teaching and contributed to studies on cross-cultural OER (re)use.

In 2008 the Ministry of Education in partnership with the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Latin American Network of Educational Portals (RELPE), the Organization of Ibero American States (OEI) and others launched the International Database of Educational Objects (BIOE), a web portal of digital learning resources in various formats, languages and at all educational levels, publicly available. It is expected with the repository (that collects resources from different countries and languages) to stimulate and support individual experience, as well as promote a leveling in a participative and democratic way.

The REA Brazil Mapping [htps://pt.wikiversity.org/wiki/Mapeamento_REA_(Brazil_Program)], a partnership between Wikimedia Foundation (by means of its grant system) and Educative Action (Ação Educativa)  is a research project – still in phase of data collecting - aiming at identifying the main agents in the field of Open Education and the opportunities and obstacles to use OER by the Brazilian education community.

Mira (Mapping of OER initiatives) is an ongoing project that resulted from a call from Hewlett Foundation[www.hewlett.org]. It started in February 2014 and aims at developing a prototype for a world map of open educational resources.

'''3.1.2 Other Brazilian OER initiatives '''

Several important initiatives have been emerging in the area of OER in Brazil. To mention a few, we can cite: BibVirt latter LabVirt launched in 1994 by Escola do Futuro da Universidade de São Paulo (an interdisciplinary lab that researches the use of new technologies in education) was a pioneer experience as a digital content repository in Brazil.

Launched in 2004, the Portal of Public Domain (Portal Domínio Público) is a virtual library that the Ministry of Education and Culture implemented to provide access to a collection of works – mostly literature, academic papers, audio and video files, among others, which are in the public domain or the use authorized by the author.

The Teachers´ Portal (Portal do Professor) launched in 2008 by the Ministry of Education in partnership with the Ministry of Science and Technology is a collaborative space with numerous resources to enrich the teachers` pedagogical practices. The resources are either licensed under Creative Commons or authorized by the authors to be used by the Ministry of Education.

Escola Digital is a searching plataform with a vast repository of videos, games, infographs, maps, among others, categorized by level, course, theme, idiom, level of acessibility, among other functionalities. The plataform was developed to help teachers easily find educational materials to enrich their classes. Escola Digital can be used, reproduced or even adapted by anyone or any interested organization.

Lume - Digital Repository of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) is a collection of digital documents produced in the university or of interest to the institution. The digital collection (text, image, video and audio), is mainly  of free access. In some cases, the access is restricted to the University community.

'''3.2. MOOCs in Brazil '''

Aiming at democratizing quality higher education in the country, Veduca in partnership with Universidade de São Paulo (USP) launched in 2012 the first Brazilian MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). The two first courses offered by USP professors are Basic Physics and Statistics and Probabilities. Another Brazilian University in Veduca is the Integrated Open University of Minas Gerais (UAITEC) which offers 1000 certified MBA programs in engineering and innovation. The platform also features video lectures from renowned universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Princeton in the US, and Oxford in the UK, translated into Portuguese. All the content in the platform is free of charge, but if a student wants a certificate, he must pay to receive one. Veduca users’ certificates are issued by the Brazilian Ministry of Education, with students tested at one of 240 test centres nationwide. Veduca has plans to launch many more courses in areas that are important to the Brazilian economy and are experiencing skills shortages, such as engineering, technology, oil and gas, and environmental sustainability.

There are several MOOC-like initiatives found in Brazil.

FGV Online, created in 2000, is an online universitary program that serves undergraduate, graduate students, executives and entrepreneurs, besides the corporate universities that develop e-learning projects. It was the first Brazilian School to become member of OCWC in 2008. Virtual School ENAP [http:// www.enap.gov.br] launched in 2007 is an initiative of the Public Administration National School which offers certified training and professional qualification to public servers.

Inspired by Mit´s Open Courseware, Unicamp OpenCourseware is a portal launched in 2011, aiming at hosting graduate educational content in digital format. The content is available to general public, free of charge. There´s no support to the user and it does not offer any certificate. The subjects covered are humanities, health and biological sciences, technology, geosciences and engineering.

Virtual University of the State of São Paulo (Univesp) aims at expanding access to higher public education to the population of the State of São Paulo. Univesp was launched by means of the Decree nº 53.536 in October 9th 2008. The project puts together renowned higher education institutions, such as Paulista State University “Júlio de Mesquita Filho” (UNESP) as important partners to offer graduation courses. Univesp offers material, financial and technological support and the universities the academic projects, content, entrance examination (Vestibular) and students´ evaluation.

Launched by Decree n. 7589/2011, the e-TEC Brazil Network (Rede e-TEC Brasil), is an initiative of the Educational Development Plan (Plano de Desenvolvimento da Educação). E-TEC Brazil Network aims at developing, expanding and democratizing access to public and free professional and technological education. The courses are offered exclusively in distance mode by public universities nationwide, which are associated with the program.

In 2012, MOOC EAD (the first MOOC in Portuguese language about Distance Education) - whose site is no longer online - was organized by a Brazilian and a Portuguese university professors. The site is no longer online. This initiative resulted in a dissertation in e-learning pedagogy presented at Open University.

In 2013, the same Brazilian university professor who organized MOOC EAD started coordinating MOOC LP - a MOOC about Portuguese Language, which is supported by the Brazilian Association for Distance Education - Associação Brasileira de Educação a Distância (ABED).

'''3.3 Legal frameworks and regulations '''

Although the issue of openness in education in Brazil from a legal point of view started to be discussed in 2010, there is still a need for OER policies to enable the use of openly licensed educational resources, dealing with accreditation matters and funding. Three Law Projects support OER in Brazil. Lei Federal (PL 1513/2011- Paulo Teixeira) that disposes the politics to hire and license intelectual pieces of work funded by the Public Power and Private Rights; Lei do Estado de São Paulo (PL 989/2011 – Simão Pedro) that establishes the politics for OER bought or developed by subvention of state direct and indirect administration, and Decreto Municipal da Cidade de São Paulo (Decree n. 52681/2011 – Alexandre Schneider) that disposes of obligatory licensee of intelectual pieces of work produced with educational learning objects, in the scope of the public municipal educational network. By means of Public Politics that support OER and determine that all public investment in the acquisition or development of educational resources be mainly used on OER is a way of garanteeing access to education, to quality materials and to methodological innovation in Brazil.

'''References '''

Albuquerque, R. C. S. P. O 1º  MOOC em  Língua Portugueesa : análise crítica do seu modelo pedagógico. 2013. Dissertação (Mestrado em Pedagogia do E-Learning). Universidade Aberta, Lisboa. 2013.

Barbosa, A.F [executive and editorial coordination; translation DB Comunicação (org.)]. Survey on the use of information and communication technology in Brazil: ICT Households and Enterprises. 2012. São Paulo: Comitê Gestor da Internet no Brasil, 2013. Retrieved 14/06/2014 from: www.cgi.br __________. Survey on the use of information and communication technologies in Brazil: ICT Education 2012. São Paulo: Comitê Gestor da Internet do Brasil, 2013. Retrieved 14/06/2014 from: www.cgi.br Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Green-Paper: The State and Challenges of OER in Brazil: from Readers to Writers? Rossini, C. Retrieved 15/06/2014 from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1549922 Carneiro, J. Brazil´s universities take affirmative action. BBC News, Business. Retrieved 17/06/2014 from: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-23862676 Document of the Work Bank. Achieving World Class Education in Brazil: The Next Agenda. Human Development Sector. Management Unit, Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Office. 2010. Retrieved 14/06/2014 from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/BRAZILINPOREXTN/Resources/3817166-1293020543041/FReport_Achieving_World_Class_Education_Brazil_Dec2010.pdf

Inamorato, A. (2011) Open Educational Resources in Brazil: State-of-the-Art, Challenges and Prospects for Development and Innovation. Unesco Institute for Information Technologies in Education. OECD. Education at a glance 2013. Retrieved 14/06/2014 from http://www.oecd.org/edu/Brazil_EAG2013%20Country%20Note.pdf. Salmi, J. & Févre, C. Tertiary Education and Lifelong Learning in Brazil. Retrieved 14/06/2014 from http://www.anped11.uerj.br/internacionalizacao/Banco_mundial/tertiary_education_in_brazil_15_Jan_09.pdf Work Bank Report. Achieving World Class Education in Brazil: The Next Agenda. Human Development Sector. Management Unit, Latin America and the Caribbean Regional Office. 2010. Retrieved 14/06/2014 from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/BRAZILINPOREXTN/Resources/3817166-1293020543041/FReport_Achieving_World_Class_Education_Brazil_Dec2010.pdf