Modelagem de um sistema de gestão na Educação a Distância no Brasil utilizando redes de Petri Coloridas.

Management is a practice that encompasses planning, organization, guidance, control and monitoring of activities in terms of means and ends. This paper presents a management system modelling for Distance Education in programs offered in Brazilian public institutions, using colored Petri nets. Moreover, it is important to mention that management acquires a high degree of complexity due to the fact that in order to deploy and maintain the distance learning courses, a set of processes that integrate and influence each other, aiming to reach pre-defined goals is required. Therefore, in order to achieve this level of complexity, this job involves tasks such as work division, responsibility assignments, setting levels of authority and to establish communication mechanisms. Accordingly, the systemic management system, currently applied to distance learning courses offered by IFCE (Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Ceará), comprises five major pillars which are: institutional, educational, technological, administrative, financial and human resources. Hence, the scope of this work deals with the modelling of the administrative and financial management process in coloured Petri nets. The model analysis has helped to identify and improve actions and activities developed in the process. It also allowed the group to have a graphical and an administrative view, which helped them to plan and execute all the funds received to run the Distance Education courses. In addition, another important aspect to mention concerns the transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, such that the execution of administrative and financial processes becomes less dependent on the people who devised it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]