Distância transacional e seus antecedentes na educação a distância

Abstract

The Transactional Distance Theory (TDT) points out that distance in the context of Distance Education (DE) is understood not as geographic or temporal, but as a pedagogical aspect to be overcome in the face of psychological and communication barriers that students and teachers face in the teaching and learning process. This theory establishes that the Dialogue and Structure constructs operate within the scope of the course's instructional design, while the Student Autonomy construct incorporates aspects of its subjectivity and are pillars for the student's perception of transactional distance. The development and validation of an attitude and perception scale for TDT makes it possible to investigate the hypotheses of this theory. This work presents the process of transcultural translation and adaptation, as well as the validation of a scale to measure the perception of distance learning students regarding the Transactional Distance construct. Graduated students who had taken an online course in instructional design at a public university, were invited to participate by responding to this scale. With the answers it was possible to test the hypotheses of TDT. Construct scores were obtained using Structural Equation Modeling. This multivariate analysis provided the evaluation of models associating the constructs to test the hypotheses of the theory. The model that best described the variability of Transactional Distance is the one in which Dialogue exerts a direct influence and Student Autonomy plays a moderating role in the relationship between Structure and Transactional Distance. This is a second-order model with high predictive power.