**1. Introduction**

In recent years, given a new federal government policy, there is a significant movement to increase enrollment in undergraduate programs of public and private universities in Brazil,

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with remarkable expansion of places for distance education. According to the Anuário Brasileiro Estatístico de Educação Aberta e a Distância, more than 2.5 million of Brazilians studied in distance education courses in Brazil in 2007, as in reference [1].

For this reason, Palloff and Pratt state that it is still necessary to increase the efforts to improve the quality of the services offered at distance education [2]. For these authors, it is indispensable that course coordinators, teachers and professors, course designers, and other professionals involved with distance courses search more and conduct more efforts regarding students treatment. In this matter, social psychology can contribute assisting in determining students' expectations and desires in order to assess the needs of apprenticeship. Additionally, other sciences, such as Management and Economy, may help to access market expectations regard‐ ing the performance and quality of employees who attended distance courses.

Bastos highlights that professional qualification can be understood as an important justifica‐ tion to the success of organizations and even to countries to keep competitive in the scenario of uncertainty and turbulences. Besides, the re-structuration of the production process demands new forms of action and reaction in the market, thus requiring new skills and competences to stay competitive worldwide [3].

As a result, many studies and researches about distance education are gaining strength around the world. In Brazil, we may give attention to authors who are investigating the institutions practicing distance education through methods that evaluate their competences. Among them, we may point out in [4-17]. Outside the country, we may give attention to other authors such as in references [18-26].

When thinking about quality and assessment, we must think about appropriate methodologies to the new market reality. Thus, according to Carlini and Ramos, in reference [6], the concept of evaluation should be understood by the following aspects: diagnostic, formation and somatization, as a practice that search to understand, ameliorate, qualify and quantify the processes of apprenticeship, giving them particular meanings and orientation to decisionmaking process in both in-classroom and distance education. In this matter, authors in references [11, 27, 13, 28] state that it is necessary to have a rigorous process of evaluation and improvement of the adopted techniques and methodologies just to provide credibility and recognition to distance education in Brazil.

In this context, this chapter will focus on the following questions: Do undergraduate distance courses produce a process of qualified and effective learning that contributes to the practices of people development in the market? If so, how do human resource managers from industrial organizations in the state of Minas Gerais evaluate the performance of their employees graduated at in-classroom and distance courses? In other words, what are the perceptions of human resource managers regarding the quality of the distance undergraduate courses offered in the market? Thus, the main objective of this study is to assess the perception of human resource managers from industrial organizations in relation to the quality of undergraduate courses offered in Minas Gerais.

It is assumed that graduated students from distance management courses contribute to the organizations because these courses empower individuals to work at marketplace without increasing management costs of people's management.

In order to verify this perception related to formation of undergraduate students, this research deals with themes relating to the aspects perceived by the organizations that demonstrate the effectiveness of the learning process of distance courses. We also identified the most relevant attributes that undergraduate students should have to be well accepted in the market, and the differences between graduated students from in-classroom courses and distance courses. The advantages and disadvantages resulting from the integration process of a newly formed employees, as well as the main contributions that have been raised from these graduate employees were identified and evaluated according to the points of view of human resource managers of industrial Organizations. It was also requested to human resource managers a comparison between in-class and distance courses that made possible the identification of common and divergent features of the two learning methods.

Keeping in mind the issues discussed above, this chapter will elucidate the quality assessment of distance education courses made by managers of industrial organizations in Brazil. The chapter will be divided into five sections: a brief introduction and justification of the theme dealt in the chapter; some considerations about the theoretical bases for discussing the fieldwork research; methodological procedures adopted to carry on the fieldwork; presenta‐ tion of the results and discussions compared with the literature review; and final considera‐ tions or conclusion.
