The objective of this article was to examine the use of learning strategies used by students of distance learning, enrolled in courses from two public institutions. A total of 821 students took part in the research, 532 of them from the South Institution and 289 from the Midwest Institution of Brazil. Data was composed from the factors: emotion control, search for interpersonal help, repetition and organization, motivation control, elaboration, search for help in the teaching material, and monitoring comprehension. Results evidenced that students from the South are more strategic in all of the analyzed factors. The analysis regarding age range evidenced differences only in factor monitoring comprehension by participants of the South, who were in the higher age range showed more strategic skills. Results presented suggest the need for training tutors focused in teaching learning strategies, which could bring satisfactory results in the sense of promoting the success of DL.