Cooperação internacional em educação superior a distância : a experiência da Universidade Aberta do Brasil em Moçambique

Abstract

The “Support Program for the Expansion of Higher Distance Education in the Republic of Mozambique” was instituted by the MEC Normative Ordinance n. 22, of october 16, 2010, at the end of the government of President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, as part of his foreign policies, which favored South-South Cooperation, in particular, with the African continent, and affirmative internal policies and expansion of Higher Education. With the creation of the Open University of Brazil, in 2006, it boosted Distance Education within public higher education institutions with a view also to the internationalization of UAB. The Program presented itself as an unprecedented experience in the country, involving four federal universities and two public universities in Mozambique to offer four distance degree courses in order to offer “double degree” and carry out “knowledge and technology transfer”, in the field of distance education, for Mozambican public institutions. Within the scope of higher education policies, the Mozambican government's goal was to train teachers in charge of public schools and civil servants working in the public service of the government of Mozambique. The Program was implemented in 2011 and, due to an economic and political situation during President Dilma's government, it was interrupted at the end of 2014. The main objective of this study was to analyze the narratives of Mozambican and Brazilian stakeholders, who had an active participation in the Program, at different levels of management, in order to recover the Program's brief trajectory and understand whether the relationships established between the participating managers were characterized and were perceived as South-South Cooperation. We collected extensive documentary material produced by the Program participants and conducted narrative interviews with the managers. The material was analyzed using historical materialism as a theoretical-methodological framework and four frameworks as categories of analysis: political, institutional, academic and Distance Education. The study was conducted within the scope of quality research with “narrative approach”. The managers' narratives revealed that the cultural dimension and the cooperation dimension permeated the experience lived in the Program. What emerged from the narratives revealed the Program's weakness in legal and governance aspects, the unequal distribution of power in decision-making moments, the little knowledge about the “other”, about the organizational culture of Mozambican institutions, the rush to implement of the Program without a diagnosis of the necessary conditions, wrong processes of institutionalization of the Program, the structuring of an EaD model disregarding the institutional experiences of the partners in this modality. The Program left lessons and legacies for South-South Cooperation in the field of distance higher education. The transfer of knowledge and technologies has materialized from the perspective of mastery and the didactic use of the Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle), the management of a more complex distance learning system, the processes of producing didactic material with characteristics of scientificity

and quality. The study highlights the dissonance between the politically elaborated discourse on South- South Cooperation and the practices implemented in the Program with no experience on the part of

Brazilian managers in this regard and little conceptual and methodological clarity to materialize this type of cooperation. It also makes the historical debate between political commitment with technical capacity and technical capacity with political commitment current. The collection of material about the Program and the interviews constitute a precious collection of this experience, a kind of “memory” - which will be available for further studies and other researchers.