Abstract
According to statistics published by governmental agencies, 58 million students are currently enrolled in formal education courses available in the Brazilian educational system as a whole. A time series covering the years 2005–2015 reveals a descending number of enrollments in basic traditional school courses and an ascending amount of students attending distance-teaching courses. Distance Teaching has been hailed as an environmentally friendlier alternative to full-time campus activities, in papers with valid statistical data. However, the authors of this work performed the environmental accounting and compared the use of natural resources needed to implement and operate two similar courses, one under traditional classroom conditions, and its distance-teaching version, using the Emergy Accounting method, which allows for different types of energy to be accounted together by using solar energy Joules as a common unit. The results show that implementing and operating the distance-teaching version required 110% more investment in natural resources than the traditional version. This result motivated the analysis, presented in this paper, of the required investment in resources supporting the entire Brazilian educational system, combined with scenarios resulting from a hypothetical full shift from traditional in-class to distance teaching.
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