The greatest access to higher education in Brazil was the target of significant public policies. Distance education is also included in this context. In 2005 a decree was published regulating this form of teaching, foreseeing the ways in which courses would be authorized and accredited. Since then, what was proposed has suffered some reformulation without a deeper evaluation of what has been established up to this point. The objective of this article is to explicit certain tendencies and designs in the present scene of distance education offer which indicate the urgent need of and for the evaluation of this public policy. For such a task, we analyze documents published by the Ministry of Education, data from Technical Summaries from Censuses of Higher Level Teaching, and publications on the subject. From these it is possible to find evidence of distortions and problems in the process of introduction of distance learning. Dropout, age of admission which is more and more distant from that of the admission that happens in the classroom learning, relationships between different federated entities, funding indicative of a supply model and the necessity of professionalizing tutors can be observed mainly in the offer concentration in only two courses. In view of all this, aspects are shown that should be resumed/reconfigured in the offer of courses in this modality, if that, in fact, the proposed objectives for its development are achieved.
expansion of higher education; public policies; distance learning; evaluation
