Internet, Multimedia and Virtual Laboratories in a 'Third World' Environment

Electronic education faces similar difficulties in low-budget institutions throughout the world (many of them in common with developed nations), including mainly rejection or disinterest from staff and students, insufficient funds, outdated hardware, incompatible software and poor Internet access. Over the past five years, with low budgets and considerable limitations in the equipment available, the Universidad Estatal a Distancia in Costa Rica has produced multimedia courses and materials for use on the Internet, as well as designing virtual laboratories that can be run on cheap computers. The authors recount their experiences in the hope that these will prove useful to others. They explain how simultaneous production of traditional materials (mainly printed textbooks) and online courses, together with simple automatic evaluation and 'outsourcing', reduce costs significantly. They 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.