AFRO-NETS> Supercourse Newsletter, December 14, 2001

[Ron Laporte <super3+@pitt.edu>]

Supercourse Newsletter, December 14, 2001
-----------------------------------------

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

Dear Friends,

GHNet - U

We have had some outstanding thoughts about how we can develop the 
first global program in prevention. The primary idea is that it has 
to be of extremely high quality, and it has to be inexpensive to 
reach some of the areas that need prevention the most. What makes a 
program of extremely high quality? It is the faculty, and it is the 
content of the lectures. With the 5,000 supercourse faculty, we have 
the largest and best academic faculty assembled. We thus have the ma-
jor components for a GHNet-U program.

Would very much appreciate your help. If you are in a University we 
need ideas as to how we might be able to integrate the Supercourse 
into your University. Also, we need some idea concerning the feasi-
bility and interest of certification as well as providing a global 
master's degree.

Frank White expressed concern that what we propose cannot be a burden 
in terms of time to faculty members locally, or we the global faculty 
members. Larry Glickman had an important idea of running mini courses 
so that we can make face contact with students. Dick Heller feels 
that it will be very important to establish problem solving examples 
in any curricula. All these are great ideas, and can be incorporated.

Here is what we have been thinking, we would appreciate comments. 
Perhaps we should start out with a curriculum on the Internet and 
Prevention. The advantage of taking this approach is that we will not 
threaten existing programs, as this is brand new. Also, the Super-
course Faculty are clearly the world's experts in this area. More-
over, this is a topic applicable in developed and developing coun-
tries alike, thus Harvard and Cambridge do not have this program, nor 
does universities in Developing countries, but presumably the inter-
est will be there.

Then the question is whether to make this a certificate course, or a 
degree course. The fear initially in making this a degree course is 
that we would have to attach this to one of our universities, where 
the tuition is very high. Perhaps it would be better to start out as 
a certificate program.

We would suggest that a set of lectures be reviewed in our Super-
course by global experts of the Internet, or Internet organizations 
(e.g. INET, IBM, Microsoft). An alternative which might be better 
would be to certify faculty members in Universities as being a health 
and Internet teacher. The advantage of this is that providing the 
certification to the teacher is an incentive. A Microsoft certifica-
tion, for example opens up business and may lead to salary advances. 
What would be an incentive to bring a certificate program like this 
into your center?

It will be easy to check to see if the students are using the lec-
tures by watching the visits from that university. The advantage of 
the Internet is that we can put their projects on the web, and these 
can be examined world wide. We need to develop a system for faculty 
certification.

The beauty of this approach is that we can have globalization of dis-
cussion among the teachers, as we have, as well as students in Uganda 
talking with students in Mexico.

We need to think out of the box for certification, as above, where we 
use our global faculty to certify, or develop a system of statistical 
quality control where we randomly send out questions to the students.

It is very important that not much of our time is used, as we do not 
have much time, nor will our universities like this.

There needs to be some form of compensation built into this. One pos-
sibility would be to approach this epidemiologically, where we adjust 
the tuition based upon the GNP or the local tuition. This can easily 
be done on the Internet. There needs to be an incentive for the 
global leaders to lend their help, and name for certification. There 
needs to be an incentive for the local teachers to participate. There 
needs to be an incentive for the Academic institutions to join world 
wide. But it cannot be built upon the existing local paradigm, as 
this will not work globally.

With a program like this a student would get an MPH degree from the 
University of Mali, or University of Sussex with an emphasis on the 
Internet, or an MPH degree with an emphasis on International Health. 
We should also consider bringing this to MD, Ph.D., RN, DVM, DDS, etc 
degrees.

This is just the first cut. Please present wild and crazy thoughts. 
The Supercourse was totally different than what had been done previ-
ously, the GHN-U, needs to be as well to attract people into preven-
tion, and to raise global standards.

This will probably take 1-2 years before we can establish a system 
that will work. 

Thanks so much for your help. It is fun to see if we can establish a 
global training program. We already have the most valuable resources, 
you, and the most valuable content, the Supercourse.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Happy Holidays, why not show Supercourse Lectures on New Years! The 
will brighten the New Year.

In Buffalo, NY, the tradition on New Years is to eat "blind robbins". 
These are smoked mackerel that make the whole house stink. However, I 
ate one last year (REL) and we all had some great luck this year. 
What are your traditions? Just curious.

Ron, Akira, Eun Ryoung, Eugene, Faina, Mita, Fan, Beatriz, Grace, 
Abed, Tom, Deb
mailto:super3+@pitt.edu

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