INDICADORES DE EVASÃO DE ALUNOS: ESTUDO EM UM CURSO EAD DA REDE FEDERAL DE ENSINO – AS CONTRIBUIÇÕES DO MARKETING DE RELACIONAMENTO

Abstract

Distance Education (EaD) is growing continuously, making it possible to reduce inequalities of opportunities and promote greater democratization of education. On the other hand, the evasion rates of the courses offered in the distance education modality are growing continuously. This dissertation addresses the topics of Distance Learning, Evasion problem and the Relationship Marketing. The research is focused on studying the students' evasion factors of an EaD course in the Federal Education Network and the contributions of relationship marketing. The study identified the attributes that led the students to evade the Technical Course in Administration offered in distance learning modality, thus responding to the research problem which was to identify the factors that motivate a student to evade an EaD course. According to the general model of the methodological procedure, the research had the qualitative exploratory conception, in which in-depth interviews were carried out with 20 students evaded from the Technical Course in Administration of the Instituto Federal Goiano (Goiano Federal Institute), through a script based in the scale of reasons for evasion in Higher Education provided by Ambiel (2015). The analyses were performed using the content analysis technique. The research made it possible to identify that the institutional reasons that lead to evasion were decisive for students to leave the course, among which the following stand out: lack of support, personal reasons, career related and academic performance, respectively. The factor which was most reported by the interviewees as a determinant for evasion was the lack of adequate structure for the students. As a suggestion, based on relationship marketing fundamentals, it was recommended to carry out improvements in the structure of the support centers, carry out preventive actions seeking to show the student the necessary effort to follow distance courses, give special attention to students in the first months of the course and perform continuous evaluations aiming to identify possible faults in order to make the necessary corrections. Due to the limitations of this work, it is suggested that new studies are necessary in other EaD courses of the Institution and also of other public and private institutions of education that offer courses in the modality of distance education.