Online courses: who can offer them and how to recruit?

Online learning is growing at a rapid pace in Brazil. To take advantage of the popularity of online learning courses, an institution needs to know that there are differences between those seeking face-to-face teaching and those seeking online learning in order to attract the correct audience.

Added to this, the wide range of courses on offer makes it even more necessary for an institution to master attraction techniques focused on the student audience, which is, in fact, made up of potential students.

There is now a layer that comes before attraction. Since May 2025, not every program can be sold as fully online in Brazil, and the in-person workload rule changed for part of the portfolio.

This article walks through the five attraction fronts that still hold and adds the two that now decide the outcome: what regulation allows you to offer, and what artificial intelligence already solves in the response queue.

Which online courses can still be delivered at a distance?

Decree 12.456, of May 19, 2025, regulated by Ministry of Education ordinances 378/2025 and 381/2025, redesigned distance delivery in Brazil. Five programs became in-person only: Law, Medicine, Nursing, Dentistry and Psychology. The rest of the catalog stays online or moves to the blended format, a new category in the framework.

The practical reading is direct. Before discussing marketing campaigns and marketing strategies, an institution needs to know which online courses it can still sell in that format and which ones must be reintroduced to the candidate.

Caption: Online courses now hold more than half of undergraduate enrollments in Brazil, and recruitment starts with knowing what can still be delivered at a distance.

Here is how the new framework organizes the points that affect the offer:

Table: Points of the new Brazilian framework that directly change what can be advertised as a distance program.

Every line in that table becomes a communication decision. A program that moved to blended has to say so on the registration page, because a candidate looking for full flexibility will discover the in-person workload mid-funnel and drop out.

The same applies to programs being phased out. A course in extinction that keeps receiving media budget generates leads the institution cannot serve, and that is the most expensive waste in any recruitment operation.

Who is the online student according to the 2024 Census?

The 2024 Higher Education Census, released by INEP on September 22, 2025, shows online courses at 50.7% of undergraduate enrollments in Brazil. It is the first time distance learning passes in-person delivery, up 5.6% over 2023 in a total of around 10 million enrollments.

This growth is driven mainly by the private sector, which concentrates almost all distance delivery in the country. The Census counts 2,244 private institutions against 317 public ones.

Although the profile of online students is still mostly made up of adults, the data shows a changing trend: the share of young people entering higher education right after finishing secondary school keeps rising. Distance education became a gateway for those seeking affordable and flexible study, not only a resource for people already working.

Considering these and other factors, such as affinity with technological resources and digital languages, is essential to outline the right profile and define suitable personas for assertive marketing strategies.

The operational consequence shows up in segmentation. An evening technology program and a blended teaching degree serve people at different life stages, and treating both with the same enrollment campaigns flattens the result of each.

How to keep an active digital presence and attract the right audience?

One of the ways to attract the right audience for an online course is to show that your institution dominates the digital environment and, therefore, will offer a quality experience. People who study at a distance judge the institution by its digital experience before judging the course.

This active presence means, among other factors: having a responsive, lightweight website with a pleasant layout; having an updated blog; offering contact methods and quick responses via chat, email or messages; and having updated profiles that interact with the public on social media.

Another consolidated trend is conversational marketing, with tools such as chatbots and customer service via WhatsApp. This approach answers questions in real time, reduces friction in the decision and increases engagement with prospective students.

One warning about consistency. An institution that takes two days to reply to a message is telling the distance learning candidate exactly what they fear about studying without a classroom.

How does simple registration increase enrollment in online courses?

The student population interested in online learning courses values the practicality that digital offers. Therefore, it is important that the educational institution meets this expectation in all contacts, and the registration form is where the promise gets tested.

Before presenting an intuitive teaching platform, you need to make sure that the registration process is simple and clear, including how doubts and enrollment problems are resolved.

Personalization has also become a powerful tool for online student recruitment. With the help of artificial intelligence applied to educational marketing, it is possible to create automated email flows, tailored content and more precise audience segmentation, increasing the lead conversion rate.

There is a new detail the framework brought to this stage in Brazil. A blended program must disclose the in-person workload and the learning center before the registration fee, or it produces enrollment that will not hold and feeds dropout in the first term.

When is the best time to promote your distance learning offer?

There are online learning courses offered throughout the year that do not require interested parties to wait for new classes to open. Even in these cases, it is important to take advantage of the moments most conducive to attracting students, because study intent is not evenly spread across the calendar.

Data collection and analysis of the student audience behavior allows the institution to identify whether demand rises because of New Year's resolutions or whether the demand for a quick course is greater during a typical vacation period.

In addition to the timing of the announcement, it is strategic to consider the preferences of the new generations. Generation Z, for example, values objective, interactive content in agile formats such as short videos and dynamic posts on social media.

Adapting the language and format of communication can considerably increase this audience's interest in the courses offered at a distance. That changes how educational marketing strategies and marketing campaigns are built: the same offer calls for a vertical video for one audience and a detailed comparison page for another.

What content attracts students to distance learning?

Content is the basis of online education and is also the most consistent marketing strategy for attraction and enrollment. It works as a free sample of what the institution delivers once the student pays.

Distance learning makes extensive use of videos to deliver classes, and investing in that same format helps separate potential online students from those who want to continue studying but do not adapt to the format. Video content for student recruitment plays that filtering role.

Another effective approach is to connect courses to employability. Showing how the content relates to the job market and offering advantages such as recognized certifications, partnerships with companies and internship programs can directly influence the enrollment decision.

This is also where student recruitment and retention meet. People who arrive knowing what they will study, and why, drop out less, and the return on retention usually beats any budget increase at the top of the funnel.

How does an AI SDR agent speed up distance learning recruitment?

An AI SDR agent answers the candidate's first contact in seconds, qualifies by what matters to the institution and hands the human team only what is ready to move forward. In distance learning, where leads arrive outside business hours and from any region, that response time decides the enrollment.

The difference from a menu chatbot is what the agent does after the conversation: it records intent in the CRM, triggers the next step in the sequence and returns the full history to the team.

There is also the predictive side. Predictive AI in student recruitment points out which leads are most likely to enroll, which lets the institution concentrate enrollment campaigns budget on people who actually convert instead of spreading investment across the whole base.

None of this replaces the earlier decision. Technology speeds up a well-designed funnel and only exposes the flaws of a poorly designed one faster, such as an outdated portfolio or a program that can no longer be offered at a distance.

Frequently asked questions about online courses

Where to start reviewing your online course portfolio?

Start with the catalog, not the media plan. Listing which online courses remain eligible, which became blended and which are being phased out solves in an afternoon a problem no campaign optimization solves later.

With the catalog in order, the sequence is familiar: personas built on real data, friction-free registration, content tied to employability and support that answers within the minute. It is the same discipline that sustains student recruitment and retention in any format, applied to an audience that decides alone, on a screen.

To track the result of that review, it helps to know how control dashboards can support your decisions.

If your institution needs to reorganize this portfolio and the educational marketing strategies behind the next intake, talk to the Mkt4edu team and start with an audit of what is already live.