AFRO-NETS> Supercourse Update

[Ronald E Laporte <ghnetu+@pitt.edu>]

Supercourse Update
------------------

Dear Friends,

Please distribute this update to your colleagues around the world who
teach epidemiology, public health, or internet technology/applications.

Supercourse: http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/

We have tabulated the information with regards to the faculty of the
Supercourse. We are very pleased to report that there are over 750
faculty members from over 80 countries.  There has been a very strong
interest in the course in the past few months with over 40 people per
month joining. Below represents a distribution by region, in the appen-
dix we have the listings by country.

Africa                   7 countries,  41 Faculty
Asia                    15 countries, 118 Faculty
Australia/New Zealand    2 countries,  32 Faculty
Latin America           16 countries, 135 Faculty
North America            3 countries, 275 Faculty
Eastern Europe           7 countries,  11 Faculty
Western Europe          17 countries, 144 Faculty
Middle East              4 countries,   7 Faculty

Total                   81 countries, 763 Faculty


We are talking with many people in China concerning the developing of a
Chinese Health Internet Supercourse (Chi-Supercourse). There seems to 
be considerable interest. We will be meeting with experts from China at 
the end of May to see about the deployment of mirrored servers in all 
the computers in China who have Internet access. In addition, we will 
be discussing with scientists in Argentina the possibility of estab-
lishing Internet mirrored servers on all the computers in Medical 
Schools in Argentina. These are our first two test cases to determine 
the acceptability of the Supercourse. 

Recently several faculty from the University of Pittsburgh began to use
the Supercourse in their teaching. It is important for us to begin to
discuss the approaches they took. Thomas Songer <tjs+@pitt.edu> used 
material produced by Hiko Tamishiro and others in the area of environ-
mental health. He took individual slides form Dr. Tamishiro's lecture 
and integrated these with his own. It was a wonderful lecture as by do-
ing it this way he was able to take the outstanding environmental 
health lectures with his own thoughts to create a brand new lecture. 
He, of course, attributed the lecture to Hiko's work. We are just 
learning how to use the course, this was a powerful way to create a 
lecture of you own, with integrating other people's materials.


Ellen R. Cohn Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh writes:

Dr. Clifford Brubaker, Dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of
Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, recently introduced our School-wide
committee on educational technology, to the Supercourse site. Dr. 
Brubaker noted that faculty typically deliver three types of course 
lectures: 
1. Supercourse caliber lectures that are practiced and well developed; 
2. Lectures that are "ok", but not polished; and, 
3. A smaller number of untried or less perfected lectures with which
   they might find themselves "skating on thin ice."

One month later, I was faced with conveying "untried material" to a 
class of 50 undergraduate students in Communication Science and Disor-
ders. Tired after four weeks of preparing new lectures, I now needed to 
present the most difficult part of the course: test construction and 
statistics. An 18+ year veteran of university teaching, I knew about 
"skating on thin ice" and quickly turned to four of the Supercourse 
lectures (i.e., "Data Collection and Sampling;" "How to Read an Article 
on a New Diagnostic Test;"  "Commonly Used Statistical Tests;" and "De-
scriptive Statistics.")

These resources enabled me to: 
1) avoid extensive research and lecture construction, 
2) quickly revisit the content, and 
3) spend my instructional efforts developing active learning opportuni-
   ties to accompany the Supercourse material.

I used the Supercourse lectures as follows. Prior to the lectures, stu-
dents were introduced to the Supercourse concept, its international 
scope, peer-reviewed lectures, and the authors of the lectures. The 
lectures were projected in class, directly off the Internet. Not all 
slides were used from each lecture. In addition to the Powerpoint 
slides, the accompanying text was projected; this was helpful to all. 
The major challenge I encountered was the need to generate discipline-
specific examples. Some of my students could not easily make the leap 
from four legged creatures with "horse colic" to two legged creatures 
with Speech and Hearing problems. A second challenge was to incorporate 
active learning strategies into the Internet-based lecture process.

Fortunately, this group of students had already been "primed" to accept
technology-supported teaching. The class was successfully using Cour-
seInfo, a web-based course management package which contains external 
links, synchronous and asynchronous discussions, student and faculty 
web pages, class handouts, e-mail, class working groups, and faculty 
generated learning assessments. Class sessions prior to Supercourse use 
incorporated both Powerpoint lectures and a variety of active learning 
exercises. Therefore, class acceptance of the Supercourse was rapid. 
Students even reread the Supercourse lectures via the external links I 
had placed on the CourseInfo site.

Finally, the students enjoyed participating in a "whole class evalua-
tion" of one of the lectures, using the on-line Supercourse evaluation 
form. They voted on each question, and the majority rating prevailed. 
The Supercourse lecture material received high ratings. 

I am most appreciative of this peer-reviewed, shared-lecture mechanism,
and hope to eventually contribute to the lecture pool. 

We would appreciate if you could add your experiences. Plan to estab-
lish a "faculty site" for the Supercourse. In the site will be discus-
sions of how to use each lecture, as well as testing materials that we 
can share among ourselves (not for students eyes!). Also, for each lec-
ture we want people to contribute to the top 20 most frequently asked 
questions, as then we can have the author of the lecture to answer the 
questions so we teachers are not stumped by a question.


Appendix: Faculty in the Supercourse

Africa

Botswana                 1
Burkina Faso             1
Ethiopia                 1
Ghana                    3
Kenya                    2
Mali                     1
Mauritius                2
Morocco                  1
Mozambique               1
Namibia                  1
Niger                    1
South Africa            16
Sudan                    2
Tanzania                 3
Uganda                   1
Zambia                   2
Zimbabwe                 2

Asia

Bangladesh               2
Cambodia                 2
China                   12
Hong Kong                5
India                    2
Indonesia                7
Japan                   22
Korea                    4
Macao                    1
Malaysia                 7
Philippines              5
Pakistan                 1
Singapore                5
Taiwan                   8
Thailand                13

Australia/New Zealand

Australia               25
New Zealand              7

Latin America

Argentina               27
Bolivia                  2
Brazil                  30
Chile                    3
Columbia                17
Costa Rica               2
Cuba                    11
Ecuador                  3
Guatemala                3
Guyana                   1
Honduras                 1
Mexico                   5
Panama                   1
Peru                    24
Uruguay                  2
Venezuela                3

North America

Canada                  42
Tobago                   1
United States          232


East Europe

Bulgaria                 1
Croatia                  2
Czech Republic           3
Georgia                  1
Lithuania                1
Slovak Republic          2
Yugoslavia               1


Western Europe

Austria                  1
Denmark                  3
Finland                  4
France                   5
Germany                 10
Ireland                  7
Israel                  10
Italy                    8
Malta                    1
Netherlands              8
Norway                   6
Poland                   1
Spain                   12
Sweden                 14 
Switzerland        (8 WHO)
Turkey                   2
United Kingdom          54

Middle East:

Egypt                    1
Lebanon                  1
Palestine                1
UAE                      4

--
Ronald E Laporte
mailto:ghnetu+@pitt.edu



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