The paper aims to unveil the contradictions that arise in the teachers’ work organization within the context of distance education. The analytical framework included the systematization of the educational data provided by the “Anisio Teixeira National Institute for Educational Studies and Research (Inep)”, the study of the documents that guide the national educational policy and empirical research carried out in higher education institutions. The results support that the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) constitute the objective base upon which speeches and practices for the democratization of access to higher education rely. The first decade of this century witnessed an enormous growth in distance education enrollment at universities. The increase, however, has triggered some contradictions such as alienation, precariousness, and the division of the teachers’ work