STUDENT PROFILE IDENTIFICATION IN DISTANCE LEARNING PUT INTO PRACTICE

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present the procedures used by distance education tutors at the University Salgado de Oliveira — UNIVERSO, when they raise the social-cultural and educational profile of their students. Such profile is used to adjust the instructional material and the content of the course. Therefore, the whole course flts the student context and his/her intellectual level and interests. This procedure produce many beneflts. First, it identifles previously acquired knowledge by the students. This allows designing distance learning courses for teaching unknown issues for them. Obviously, this provides a real enlargement of knowledge. Second, description of the student context and their recurrent professional problems has shown to be a helpful aid to make tutorial processes more effective. The article describes the process of surveying the student profile and suggests several ways to take advantage of the data collected.