Publishing and accessing contents on a virtual learning environment of a higher education institution

This paper is on the scope of the use of virtual learning environments in higher education institutions. The aim is to understand between the school year of 2009/2010 to 2013/2014 the use of a virtual learning environment of a Portuguese higher education institution in terms of publishing of contents by teachers, the type of contents published, the students access to these contents as well as the exploration of relationships between published content and access to these contents. The data were obtained by document analysis, using databases to retrieve the records of publication of contents and access, during the study period. The contents published by teachers were integrated into categories: PDF, Text Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Images, Compressed Files and Multimedia. Most of the contents were published in PDF format.