STUDENT PERCEPTION OF THE UFRN UNDERGRADUATE COURSE REGULATIONS: INTERNAL ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION AND THE STUDENT AFFILIATION PROCESS.
Institutional Communication. Students. Affiliation. Regulation
Organizational communication is crucial for public institutions, which have a legal duty to ensure not only transparency and publicity of their actions but also the accessibility of this information to society. In higher education, documents such as statutes and regulations guide academic operations. Knowledge of the norms and codes existing within these institutions can influence students' performance and/or integration process in these spaces. This work focused on the relationship between internal organizational communication and the student affiliation process at UFRN. Its main objective was to investigate the perception of students from a History degree program at the institution regarding the Undergraduate Course Regulations (Regulamento dos Cursos de Graduação - RCG) of UFRN. It aimed to identify how communication barriers or the absence of communicative accessibility could impact their institutional affiliation process. Given this context, this study is characterized by a quali- quantitative approach within applied research, adopting a descriptive perspective to characterize the problem. To this end, an online questionnaire was administered to students to identify their perceptions and difficulties in understanding the institutional regulations. The results demonstrate the existence of gaps or barriers in the process of communicative accessibility. A significant portion of the sample (67.5%) stated they had never had contact with the RCG, and another 68.5% reported not knowing how to access or having never searched for the document. Furthermore, among the 114 study participants, 69 individuals (60.5% of the sample) stated that they turn to other fellow students when they have doubts about academic-administrative matters of the course. Complementarily, primary documentary research was conducted using reports from the institution's Integrated Asset, Administration, and Contracts System (SIPAC), focused on analyzing the types of processes most frequently requested by students at the course secretary's office. These results served as a basis for the development of a distance learning (EAD) course module, the institutional product of this research, which aims to support the student affiliation process at UFRN, adding to other institutional initiatives that seek to make this process effective.