a) Developing countries

The dental health in Chilean scholars who attend schools in geographically isolated poor regions had become a worrying issue, difficult to handle for the health Ministery, as the dental decay in that group of people is major and the dental budget minor.This model of dental health education through a distance course, is designed to promote and increase dental health in a group of scholars between 4-8 years of age, who attend public schools in geographically isolated poor areas, which for that reason have difficulties to access the preventive policies of the health ministery.The course contains two parts: one destinated to the teachers of the group of scholars, which consists of an internet based dental health course, and the other one destinated to the children participating in the model, which is based in interactive games (a multimedia C.D.)A model of that nature must be evaluated from a sociological point of view, in order to measure the impact of distance education on promoting and increasing health in groops of poor people. If in fact health does increase, then this type of "self-education in health", through distance courses, could be held as a weapon to diminish dental expenses of the health ministery in such a way, that the dental budget could be focoused in prevention and still have resources left for restauration.To make this model the most accurate, It will be developed by an interdisciplinary team compossed of 2 Dentists and a computer engineer from the University of Concepción, CHILE; and 3 sociologists from the University of Lund, SWEDEN.The dentists gave the theoretical and practical contents of the course to the engineer, who designed the technical structure of it; the people at the Department of sociology in Lund University who have vast experience in distance education and evaluation, supervised the academic structure of the course, and will be leading the final part of the model which is the sociological evaluation of it.