Distance education, and particularly electronic distance education, is growing worldwide, specially with the development of Internet. It is used for learning by all age groups, from children who must study at home to professionals who need continued education to adults who want an university degree to senior citizens with reduced mobility. Distance education is defined by several characteristics, but the most important is that students and teachers are separated in space, an often, also in time.
In poor countries, universities that in the past only faced local competition must now compete with institutions from Europe and the USA that, thanks to the Internet, offer on-line courses with practically no need to invest in the countries where they expand. Additionally, in Latin America the market is also open to the growth of small private "garage" universities that reduce costs to the extreme. They mainly teach business administration and do not spend on scientific research.
Over the last four years, with low budgets and considerable limitations in the equipment available, the Costa Rican Distance Education University (UNED)
has produced multimedia courses and materials for use on the Internet, as well as designing virtual laboratories that can be run on cheap computers.
UNED has three decades of experience and serves 20 000 students. This site presents the experiences of my research and development team in the hope that these will prove useful to others. We explain how simultaneous production of traditional materials (mainly printed textbooks) and online courses, together with simple automatic evaluation and "outsourcing", reduce costs significantly. We conclude that HTML and JAVA are currently the choice computer languages to reach the greatest number of users without need of a specific computing platform, powerful computers or expensive software.
Most of this site is in Spanish but the reports often have English abstracts. An English language summary of how we coped with widespread technical and human difficulties, is here:
To search for scientific publications about distance education click here.
Julian Monge - Nájera / State Distance Education University (UNED), Costa Rica /
