Líneas de investigación y tendencias de la educación a distancia en América Latina a través de las tesis doctorales

The purpose of this article is to examine, understand and analyze the characteristics and general trends of doctoral theses about distance education in Latin America. To this end, this research is composed of two phases, the first performed a descriptive analysis of a total of 183 documents defended between 2004 and 2011. In this part the trends and needs of distance education how research areas discussed in the doctoral thesis analyzed. In the second phase, through analysis of references citing references used as an indicator of consumption are detailed. The results show that the dispersion of research topics has not changed significantly and that there are two areas within the distance education are proposed for future research.