The subjects involved in education, which is mediated by information and communication technologies - either being students, instructors, tutors, or teaching assistants - experience critical situations that affect and cause tension to the learning processes, thus interfering in educational practices. This article identifies tension zones that occur at ‘Instituto VIAS’, in Santa Catarina, Brazil, which is a distance-learning setting. Content analysis was used in order to investigate the perceptions of professionals, regarding their own experience when developing distance-learning programs, between 2004 and 2005. Three situations that impact the development of distance-learning programs were characterized as tension zones: the autonomy of adult students, the positions of learner- teacher, held by both, students and instructors, and the student's alliance with the program. The analysis uses Deleuze and Guattari' s concepts in relation to molar and molecular movements, thus allowing reflections upon educational processes in distance learning contexts, as well as, about the possibility that individuals can have of building up new spaces for knowledge production.
Distance education; educational processes; content analysis
