The future is what moves us. When you consider the past and the present to make your decisions right now, as you read this book, for example, the present is gone, joining the past.

Take a second, and watch what you're doing now. Every instant of a new lifetime that you acquire in your in-breath already makes the out-breath the next past. Gone with life in that last breath of air. Without a fresh inspire, you can say goodbye. It is no different from what happens in the world of education.

Brazil has encountered a frenetic cycle of innovations in the ways of teaching and learning since the mid-1990s. That was when the country opened its eyes to the possibility of intensifying the offer of Higher Education with the use of advanced communication methodologies and technologies and information, and recognized as a whole by Distance Education.

The basic cycle that we have lived since then in university institutions in relation to Distance Education is an equation that starts with the ideation that leads to a purpose or project, and its implementation or discard after passing through the scientific validation criteria.

This equation has the following terms: Assumption (ideation) > Proposition > Creation > Experimentation > Evaluation > Adjustments, and finally > Improvement or Destruction of the developed models. We live this endless cycle in the search for new (or better and more effective) ways to teach and learn.

The poet, composer and singer from Ceará Antônio Carlos Belchior, who enchanted Brazil and all of Latin America when he created Velha Clothes Colorida, left in his legacy verses that express the continuous motion of the road, and that if it applies both to Education and to other fields of scientific knowledge. See what primacy, what poetic preciousness:

you don't feel nor see

But I can't help but say my friend That a new change is soon to come And what was once new, young man Today is old,And we all need to rejuvenate [...] At present the mind, the body is different And the past is a garment that no longer fits us [...] And what some time ago was new, young Today is old, And we all need to rejuvenate If you consider, when reading these verses by Belchior, that I can give you a single tip about what will come in Distance Education, time was wasted so far. There is no crystal ball.

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