O campo de estudos sobre educação a distância: um estudo bibliométrico em periódicos nacionais

Abstract

Studies of Distance Education (DE) have grown in recent years taking the attention of researchers and educational managers as to their particularities.Given this, there is a need to diagnose how are the Brazilian studies on this theme, identifying the possible features and limitations to theoretical and methodological advances. So, the objective of this article is to map the field of studies on Distance Education in Brazil, comparing it to some international studies. For this, we developed a bibliometric study from 51 articles published between the 2008 to 2013 years in 23 national journals, and a bibliographic study from the 20 major international articles identified in the Web of Knowledge database.The articles were investigated based on content analysis, identifying the key themes and methodologies used, as well as main authors and institutions with the highest number of publications.Among the main results, we found out that the predominance in the Brazilian studies is the great interest for pedagogical and methodological aspects of distance education, a predominance of qualitative approaches and a low interaction between institutions in co-authoring network. The results are valid for a greater understanding of the research involving the theme "Distance Education in Brazil", allowing identifying possible trends and limitations of this field of study.