November 11, 2025
The new milestone of Distance Learning: between presence and inclusion
Instead of improving platforms, the standard tends to direct resources to structures and services aimed at physical presence
The decree nº 12.456/2025, signed in May of this year, does not create a new distance education (EaD) policy, but redefines the conditions for offering undergraduate courses in Brazil. Together with ordinance 378/2025, from the MEC, it establishes three official formats — in-person, blended, and distance —, delimiting minimum and maximum percentages of synchronous and asynchronous in-person activities and distinguishing, among the areas of knowledge, which courses should adopt a higher in-person load, which remain restricted to the exclusively in-person format, and which can maintain an essentially digital structure.
The stated objective is to reinforce the quality and credibility of Distance Learning, after a period of accelerated and uneven expansion. The decree introduces a regulatory architecture based on attendance limits. For distance learning courses, Article 12 defines the mandatory requirement of 10% of the workload to be in-person and another 10% for in-person or synchronous mediated activities, leaving institutions to define the format for the other 80%. Ordinance 378/2025, in turn, differentiates the requirements for blended learning courses according to the area:
• Education and natural sciences, mathematics and statistics: 30% in-person and 20% synchronous mediated activities;
• Health, engineering, agriculture, and veterinary medicine: 40% in-person and 20% synchronous mediated.
The measure directly affects undergraduate degrees, prohibited in the exclusively distance modality (Art. 9, II). A pedagogy course with 3,200 hours will now require 960 in-person hours and another 640 in-person or synchronous hours, totaling 1,600 hours under direct control. The format thus becomes high-density blended learning, with increased demand for learning centers, faculty, and physical infrastructure — representing a shift from the predominantly digital model that had been consolidated.
Between quality and restriction
Under the argument of raising quality standards, the new legislation imposes significant practical challenges. The expansion of the in-person workload requires investments in facilities, equipment, and calendar reorganization, mainly affecting institutions that bet on digital models.
The MEC’s regulatory effort responds to real distortions in the sector, such as the disorderly expansion of campuses and the offering of courses with minimal tutoring, which have compromised the credibility of distance education in the country. This control is essential to curb mercantilist practices and ensure minimum quality standards. However, even though the intention is legitimate, the proposed model tends to restrict flexibility— one of the pillars of distance education. It is necessary to distinguish between control that guarantees quality and limitations that inhibit innovation, preserving public and private experiences that have already demonstrated formative effectiveness.
Among the public ones, there are relevant experiences that demonstrate the possibility of reconciling rigor and technological innovation, such as the Open University of Brazil (UAB), the Virtual University of the State of São Paulo (Univesp), the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), and the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). These institutions have structured programs based on original materials, qualified tutoring, and systematic monitoring, showing that it is possible to guarantee quality without giving up technological mediation.
The inclusive dimension is significant: UAB operates throughout the territory through partnerships with federal universities; Univesp reaches over 380 municipalities in São Paulo and about 80,000 students. UFRGS and UFSCar are examples of similar initiatives that include vulnerable segments of the population — students from peripheral areas, rural students, or workers —, for whom distance learning can represent the only real possibility of accessing higher education.
Inclusion
Thus, the dilemma arises: how to include and educate with excellence? While society seeks to train good professionals, the State also assumes the role of correcting historical inequalities. Distance learning expresses this ambiguity: quality and inclusion are interdependent dimensions — the former is realized by the latter, and both are sustained by the balance between flexibility and pedagogical rigor. When well-structured, it expands access without compromising training; subjected to rigid requirements of in-person attendance, it ends up becoming a social barrier.
Some studies reinforce this understanding. Lomellini, Lowenthal, Snelson, and Trespalacios (2025), in a broad review of accessible and inclusive online learning (Journal of Computing in Higher Education, v. 37, n. 3), show that distance learning has high potential for inclusion, especially for people with disabilities or mobility restrictions, provided it is supported by adequate infrastructure, teaching support, and instructional design.
Along the same lines, Gijón, Fernández-Bonilla, Ruiz-Rua, and Martínez-de-Ibarreta (2024), in research presented at the 24th ITS Biennial Conference (Seoul), analyze online education as a vector of equity. They conclude that, although it expands access for rural and working students, technological inequality is still the central obstacle.
Silva and Álvarez (2023), in the Revista de Educación Superior of IESALC-UNESCO, observe that virtual modalities in postgraduate studies are inclusion strategies in regions with low face-to-face coverage. In the Brazilian context, Veloso and Mill, in Educação a distância e inclusão: uma análise sob a perspectiva docente (2019), identify that, although distance education (EaD) is inclusive, structural weaknesses persist that limit its effectiveness as a tool for democratization. The authors highlight that deficiencies in infrastructure, tutoring, and connectivity still compromise the consolidation of a truly equitable distance education model in the country.
These studies converge on an essential point: the challenge of Distance Learning (EaD) does not lie in its digital format, but in how it is implemented. When regulation relies on rigid percentages of in-person attendance, disregarding the diversity of student conditions — connectivity, commuting, work hours —, it ends up restricting the flexibility that sustains inclusion and redirects structural investments.
The presence of meaning
The debate on distance learning could be less about distance and more about presence of meaning: the professor’s presence in monitoring, the institution’s in quality assurance, and the student’s in their autonomous journey. Reducing education to the materiality of the classroom ignores that culture and knowledge have already crossed digital borders for decades. The challenge is not to contain technology, but to guide it towards the human.
In light of these reflections, a question arises: if the decree associates quality with physical presence, would it be coherent to apply the same principle to other distance learning modalities? If presence is a quality requirement, specialization courses and continuing education would, by definition, be in an inferior position — which is conceptually fragile. The quality of a course lies not in displacement, but in the density of pedagogical mediation and the authenticity of learning.
When the norm associates quality predominantly with physical presence, it runs the risk of confusing means and ends, establishing hierarchies between modalities instead of qualifying them by the function they should fulfill. In this movement, it can inadvertently inhibit the potential for pedagogical innovation in an expanding hybrid and digital educational ecosystem.
The virtual learning spaces
The synchronous meeting, recognized as a mediated activity, exemplifies the new paradigm of pedagogical presence: virtual in space, simultaneous in time, and hybrid in its effects. The bond replaces mere physical location, preserving formative value even when accessed asynchronously, when it is possible to pause the class and review the content point by point. Three-dimensional simulations and modeling expand the cognitive potential of distance learning, creating virtual laboratories that bring the student closer to practice. More than replacing the real, such resources expand it, when guided by pedagogical intentionality and methodological rigor.
Although decree 12.456/2025 recognizes mediated synchronous activities, its conceptual axis still relies on physical presence as a quality criterion. The norm admits the hybrid, but does not equate it to in-person, maintaining a hierarchy between space and mediation. This is a partial advance: it recognizes the importance of interaction, but does not yet fully incorporate the contemporary notion of pedagogical presence, also exercised digitally and relationally.
By linking quality to in-person attendance, the decree discourages, even if indirectly, strategic investment in technological solutions and the consolidation of robust digital ecosystems capable of ensuring formative support and real inclusion. Instead of promoting — and even mandating, since it is law — the improvement of platforms, instructional design, and mediated practices, the norm tends to redirect resources to physical structures: buildings, cafeterias, security, transportation, and other facilities and services focused on physical presence.
Therefore, a regulatory framework would be necessary, one that delved into the pedagogical architecture of the courses, instead of concentrating predominantly on their material format, and that recognized in this architecture a contemporary way to reconcile flexibility, quality, and the principle of education for all, as advocated by law 9.394/1996.
The new milestone represents a rebalancing effort. The tension is not between innovators and regulators, but between institutional autonomy and public quality assurance. The challenge, the watchword in this context, is to find the point where regulation protects without paralyzing innovation. If the State imposes disproportionate limits, it compromises the inclusion that EaD helped to build — and, in this retraction, it risks making socially relevant advances unfeasible and slowing down technological investments; if it relinquishes supervision, it paves the way for precariousness.
Between the build-up and the dismantling, there is a path of intelligent reconstruction: one that recognizes presence as value, but not as dogma; and distance as method, but not as absence.
Who wrote this column
Roberto Munhoz
