Characterization of the Paraguayan non-face-to-face academic offer in Higher Education in 2021

Abstract

Due to the forced quarantine originated by the Covid-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2021, the importance of having an academic offer of non-face-to-face courses at all levels, including higher education, is evident, an offer that already existed before the aforementioned situation but that was quite low compared to the face-to-face offer. To obtain these data from an official source, there is the national registry of careers of the Ministry of Education and Sciences, this database contains the total academic offer of higher education in Paraguay, including information on all undergraduate, undergraduate, and graduates degrees. postgraduate degrees defined by the Law of Higher Education 4995/13, including the modality in which said careers are offered. The objective of this study is to characterize the academic offer in the remote mode using the data provided by the Ministry to generate a visualization tool that allows the aforementioned data to be obtained quickly and dynamically. The type of research is applied, exploratory-descriptive and quantitative considering the aforementioned objective. As a result, a tool available on the web and accessible to any interested party was obtained, thanks to this the following conclusions can be presented about the non-face-to-face academic offer: the still very low number of careers that are offered in the distance modalities and virtual, the unclear differentiation between these modalities, the institutions that offer the greatest number of this type of careers, where the leadership of private universities is evidenced, the degree levels where undergraduate and undergraduate studies prevail and the areas of knowledge of the same where education-related careers prevail.