ABSTRACT One of the main needs of Latin America, besides education coverage, is to reduce learning gaps in higher education. In order to respond to such need, many strategies have been designed, worldwide, to impact the demand and provision of higher education programs. Among these strategies we can find grants and scholarships, financial aids, and others. Many have been the options that have been proposed to raise the provision of higher education programs, such as offering technology-supported education modalities like blended-learning, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and distance and online education. This paper aims to explore the potential of the provision of distance education programs to close learning gaps in Colombia’s higher education. In order to do so, we present an estimatation of the effects that students and programs characteristics can have on the results of the test “Saber PRO” (a Colombian standardized test that measures the level of competences developed by students in different higher education programs). This estimation was done applying a mixed model (Hierarchical Linear Modeling-HLM) based on the information of 451,358 students who were assessed in their last phase of their university major. Data were collected from 2016 to 2018. The econometrics estimations show that controlling individuals’ backgrounds and the characteristics of different academic programs, the variables that were highly associated with the reduction of learning gaps among individuals registered in distance programs compared to face-to-face programs are the students’ age and their cognitive backgrounds (grades in standardized tests taken before their undergraduate studies). The results show that we could expect distance education to become an efficient mechanism to contribute to the reduction of learning gaps in higher education. The quantitative findings suggest a series of research questions that invite to reflect about the potential of distance education in medium-income countries.

中文翻译：

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Potencial De La Educación a Distancia Para Reducir Brechas De Aprendizaje En Educación Superior: Una Mirada Al Caso Colombiano

摘要 除了教育覆盖面之外，拉丁美洲的主要需求之一是减少高等教育中的学习差距。为了满足这种需求，世界范围内设计了许多策略来影响高等教育课程的需求和提供。在这些策略中，我们可以找到助学金和奖学金、经济援助等。许多已被提议用于提高高等教育计划的提供，例如提供技术支持的教育模式，如混合学习、大规模开放在线课程 (MOOC) 以及远程和在线教育。本文旨在探讨提供远程教育计划以缩小哥伦比亚高等教育学习差距的潜力。为了做到这一点，我们评估了学生和课程特征对“Sabre PRO”测试（一种衡量不同高等教育课程学生能力水平的哥伦比亚标准化测试）结果可能产生的影响。该估计是根据 451,358 名在大学专业最后阶段接受评估的学生的信息应用混合模型（分层线性建模-HLM）完成的。数据收集于 2016 年至 2018 年。 计量经济学估计表明，控制个人背景和不同学术课程的特征，与面授课程相比，远程课程注册的个人之间的学习差距减少高度相关的变量是学生的年龄和他们的认知背景（在本科学习之前进行的标准化考试成绩）。结果表明，我们可以预期远程教育将成为有助于缩小高等教育学习差距的有效机制。定量研究结果提出了一系列研究问题，以反映中等收入国家远程教育的潜力。