PEDAGOGICAL REENCHANTMENT, REGULATION AND QUALITY IN DISTANCE EDUCATION: EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS, CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON OF THE NEW BRAZILIAN REGULATORY FRAMEWORK (2025)

Abstract

This chapter critically analyzes the New Regulatory Framework for Distance Education in Brazil (2025), understanding regulation as a pedagogical and epistemological device capable of reorganizing institutional practices, strengthening academic governance, and repositioning the centrality of learning. The text argues that the expansive trajectory of distance education, while broadening access to higher education, has revealed tensions related to quality assurance, faculty proportionality, coherence between the curriculum and institutional operation, pedagogical mediation, and academic monitoring. In this context, the 2025 regulatory reform emerges as a structuring response, shifting the focus from quantitative expansion to qualitative consolidation, with greater institutional accountability, supervision of learning centers, and formalization of quality indicators. The theoretical framework articulates national and international authors who advocate for the centrality of faculty mediation, the intentional integration of technologies into the curriculum, and the need for institutional structures capable of sustaining formative quality. The study adopts a qualitative, hermeneutic-interpretative, and comparative methodology, examining the normative changes and their pedagogical and organizational implications, in addition to situating the Brazilian case within an international perspective of quality assurance in digital education. The text demonstrates that the new regulatory framework represents a paradigmatic inflection by reinforcing structured pedagogical governance, continuous monitoring of learning, teacher proportionality, and integration between pedagogical design and academic execution. As an analytical category, it proposes "pedagogical re-enchantment," understood as the reconstruction of the formative meaning of distance education through the reintegration of technology, curricular intentionality, and qualified human mediation. Finally, the chapter concludes that the 2025 regulatory framework inaugurates a cycle of maturity for Brazilian distance education, aligned with international trends of balance between democratization of access and qualitative consolidation. The effectiveness of this movement depends on the institutional internalization of regulation as a strategy for academic strengthening and not merely as a bureaucratic requirement, consolidating an ethical, consistent distance education guided by structural quality criteria.