Education in the Digital Age: an Overview of the Online Courses Teacher Training in Brazil

The cyber culture changes relations with the knowledge: the speed of emergence and renewal of information, the new relationship with work and the consolidation of digital technologies that modify the natural cognitive processes of perception, memory, imagination and reasoning. This new educational reality is seen in the expansion of online courses, which alter the boundaries of the physical space of the classroom to the virtual one, cyberspace. Countries like Brazil have used the potential of cyber culture as space of knowledge building to offer online teacher under graduation courses. The Brazilian government has invested in official programs such as Pro teacher education and the Open University of Brazil, to offer online degree courses in various fields of knowledge in order to meet the shortage of legally qualified teachers. This is very significant since Brazil is the fifth largest country in area and in many cities of the country there are no university campi. Thus, the education of online teachers has allowed access to higher education for these professionals in very distant areas of the country. In this paper it was focused the online training of teachers in Visual Arts, which brings up methodological issues, since this type of course requires, beyond the theoretical points, the artistic practice. So the investigation of how the online courses of teacher training in Visual Arts proceeds using the method case study. Started trying to understand its scope through a mapping of online teacher training course existing in Visual Arts in Brazil. The profile of the students and teachers who make up this community of learning was also identified considering the professional training and previous experience with cyber culture. The research discusses the implications of cyber culture in education, examining the motivations for the adoption of an online teacher training policy and its repercussions for the education in general terms.