Prejudice and distance education: university student's attitudes against distance education undergraduate courses

The distance education is a current issue but also a new way of teaching-learning. Today, distance education uses new information and communication technologies becoming more disseminated an each year and taking under its goals, the main objective to make the educational process more inclusive. The new laws about this subject and the growth on the number of distance education courses, including graduation, demand more research over this modality. One of the drawbacks for the implementation of graduate programs in semi-presential mode is the prejudice against distance education. In order to identify if there are prejudiced attitudes about distance education among the students of presential courses were conducted 90 questionnaires, with open and closed questions, focusing on the cognitive and affective perceptions. Qualitative analyses were conduct and identified a general attitude of prejudice against the distance education courses, within the researched academic environment, made mainly from a skepticism about the quality of courses in the training of students, feeling justified by the perception of a lack of specific training of educators to act in manner and misuse of distance education typical computer resources.