Tesis doctorado, Lea Sulmont Haak
Doctorado en Ciencias de la Educación (2004)
Universidad de Ciencias y tecnologías de Lille, Francia
At the dawn of 21st century, distance learning in Universities unfolds in a different context from that of early distance universities. Organisation, pedagogy, technology and production develop in a context of institutional change, guided by the external constraints of the emerging globalisation trend of education and training: expansion, commoditisation, competition, industrialisation, digitalisation.
In order to understand emerging practices such as distance learning, oriented towards more flexible education and training, the global context is analysed. This work touches commoditisation of education and university initiatives, particularly under the virtual university label. The evolution of universities in this virtualisation trend (ICT integration, flexible education, distance learning, e-learning, virtual campuses,...) signals a process of organisation change of the education institution as a whole.
The concept of educational device allows grasping all the problems dimensions. Along three chapters, it helps in splicing the various layers involved in building distance learning devices.
The research field is that of implementation of an institutional project aimed at installing distance learning within the Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) in 2001-2003. From an analytic description, longitudinal and comprehensive, of the PUCP Virtual initiative, we gather the elements to state a model of adapted education and pedagogy engineering. We apply the general approach to one specific training device
and propose further development paths on pending questions related to the reconfiguring role of the University towards learning in a globalised scenario.
This work contributes to the modeling of engineering and of tensions existing within the process of distance learning device construction. It identifies and places operating practices in an equilibrium between pedagogical choices, production logic and global context constraints. Special attention is given to the PUCPs education model, the means of intervention and their evolution, and to the critical points of implementation of distance learning in PUCP.
The results apply to both the Peruvian university context and the French scientific community concerned with open and distance education. Systematisation and documentation of the Peruvian experience represents a contribution to a more global understanding of the current situation of the University in order to better restate its mission towards society.