Institutional change through collaborative study: reconfigurations in distance education at a university

Abstract

Collaborative professional development processes can foster learning that extends beyond the individual level, although it remains important to understand how such learning reaches institutional guidelines and practices. This article analyzes how a collaborative process involving faculty members and technical staff was related to the production of professional learning and pedagogical-institutional changes in distance education at a university. This qualitative documentary study analyzed secondary data previously produced during a 15-month institutional process involving more than 70 professionals. The corpus comprised institutional documents, recordings of collaborative study meetings, responses from 27 professionals to an evaluation questionnaire, and records of faculty activity in the university's Moodle platform. The results reveal connections among the identification of work-related problems, professional learning, the shared construction of alternatives, and the institutionalization of collectively developed guidelines. The development and subsequent institutionalization of a Guiding Framework constituted a mediation between learning fostered through the collaborative process and its incorporation into institutional guidelines. Comparison of Moodle records before and after the Framework also identified changes in practices related to dimensions problematized during the process. The study concludes that collaborative processes can acquire institutional reach when connected to mechanisms that enable collectively constructed knowledge and decisions to be incorporated into institutional guidelines and practices.