AFRO-NETS> Supercourse Newsletter - March 18, 2002

[Ron Laporte <super2+@pitt.edu>]

Supercourse Newsletter - March 18, 2002
---------------------------------------

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

Dear Friends,

March Macho Man: 
The response to the March Macho Man calendar was extraordinary. The 
Macho man for those who did not visit was the father of Preventive 
Medicine, John Last. He provided a wonder photograph for the calen-
dar. It was also fascinating that when he was announced, on the next 
day there was a 10 fold increase in the number of visits to the Su-
percourse calendar. Clearly our faculty wants to have John Last on 
their wall!

NIH grant: 
We had indicated that we submitted a grant to the NIH Epidemiology 
study section, and we had made this available on the Internet at 
http://www.pitt.edu/~super2/GRANT2/

Disappointingly the grant was not funded. As soon as we received the 
comments we will make these available to our faculty. We are now 
looking to find other sources of funding. If you hear of any, please 
let us know.

FSU National Supercourse:
The FSU (Former Soviet Union) Supercourse is growing very rapidly. 
Eugene Shubnikov has done a wonderful job in setting it up. Eugene 
just did a great table comparing the FSU Supercourse with data from 
WHO, the World Bank, and other sources. This table is presented be-
low. As seen, the National Supercourses are not in competition with 
the other sources in that the audiences are quite different. We are 
targeting the educators of the world to provide to them the best 
quality data that are readily presentable in PowerPoint, so we can 
speed the transfer of national health data into the classroom. Once 
developed this can be a very powerful method to distribute national 
data. The National Supercourse uses CDs, and the Internet to dissemi-
nate with PowerPoint, in contrast the other approaches are not as 
flexible. The National Supercourse will have quality control systems 
embedded into it. Even if you are not in the FSU, but are interested 
in health there, we would love to have you join. Please contact 
Eugene Shubnikov <eshub@mail.nsk.ru>. He will also send to you a copy 
of the comparison table that he has created. We would love to have 
your comments.

May 29: 
This is the birthday of Ron LaPorte, he will be 53 years old. Ron is 
a very strange person, he does not want cards, he does not want you 
to send him a Mercedes or a Rolex watch. He does not want you to send 
to him a birthday cake. Ron LOVES to get lectures, so, why not sur-
prise him and target May 29th as the day you send your lectures to 
him? We are steaming along, and have a chance to cross the 800 bar-
rier by the end of this year. If you get your lecture in, Rania will 
translate it into Arabic, and Eugene will promote this across the 
FSU. Remember, potentially there are 10-30 million visits a year on 
the Supercourse, few people will see you lecture if it sits in your 
drawer. What a wonderful birthday it would be to get 53 lectures on 
Ron's 53rd birthday.

Globalization: 
Many of our faculty do not realize that the Supercourse is one of 
the, if not the best known prevention and global education projects. 
This of all the projects you know, it is likely that the Supercourse, 
with you as a faculty member is the most recognized. But, it is not 
recognized enough. We would very much appreciate if you promote the 
Supercourse. Please provide lectures on the Supercourse in your coun-
try, we will send to you updated slides that you can use. Also, below 
is a short abstract about the Supercourse. Please forward it to your 
friends and colleagues, as we would love for everyone in prevention 
to know about this effort.

Review of the Supercourse by Sharon Fowler from Texas:

It has been exhilarating to see the range of topics covered by the 
Supercourse, to sense the worldwide community of teachers and inves-
tigators involved, and to sense we're all in this together! (Just 
seeing a lecture in Russian was quite an experience.) Your Super-
course has blown the walls off our classroom and our curriculum. It 
is *very* gratifying to be able to offer the students such a wide 
range of topics, so that they can choose an area of interest to them 
beyond whatever we would be able to present from our backgrounds and 
experience.

Thanks so much.

Ron, Akira, EunRyoung, Faina, Mita, Eugene, Rania, Fan, Fred, Kiran, 
Benjamin, Beatriz, Tom, Deb


Please distribute this to all you know in prevention, public health 
and the Internet.

--
Supercourse <http://www.pitt.edu/~super1>
mailto:super6@pitt.edu

Question: What is the best way to improve prevention training world-
wide? 
Answer: Get better lectures.

Question: How do we improve lectures and research translation? 
Answer: Have academic faculty worldwide share their lectures for 
free.

Question: Will faculty share lectures? 
Answer: Yes, The Supercourse has 4,932 faculty from >3,500 universi-
ties from 130 countries who created a Library of Lectures with 640 
lectures available on the Internet. The 640 lectures represent over 
600 books on public health. This is being shared worldwide.

We were funded three times by NASA, and we are now the only grant on 
prevention funded by the National Library of Medicine. We are devel-
oping a "Library of Lectures" with passionate lectures in epidemiol-
ogy, global health and the Internet. Our program consists of:

1. Shareware: 
A Global faculty is developing and sharing their best, most passion-
ate lectures. This benefits all. The experienced faculty member can 
beef up old lectures. New instructors reduce preparation time and im-
prove their lectures, using state of the art lecture templates from 
others. Faculty in developing countries have access to the latest 
prevention information for the first time the format is annotated 
Power-Point. All CDC lectures are available on our site. 

2. Statistical Quality Assurance: 
We have established a Deming Model of Statistical Quality Control to 
monitor lectures over time. 

3. Supporting the teachers: 
The Library of Lectures consists of exciting template lectures by 
academic prevention experts in the field. The classroom teacher 
"takes" them out for free like a library book. We train the teacher 
rather than direct distance teaching of students. 

4. Hypertext comic book: 
The lectures are icon driven, and the students can go deep into the 
Internet for more information. 

5. Presentation Speed: 
We have developed technologies to speed access to lectures world 
wide. 

6. Text books: 
British Medical Association has put current text books on line for 
us. 

7. Multilingual: 
For global use, the first lecture is in 8 languages.

8. Faculty: 
Jeff Koplan, head of CDC, John Patrick, VP from IBM, and John Last, 
the father of preventive medicine, have provided lectures as has Vint 
Cerf, the father of the Internet. Four Directors of NIH Institutes 
have also promised lectures. 

9. Leapfrogging the Digital Divide: 
We are copying the Supercourse on CDs and floppies to reach the 95% 
of the world not connected.

We have submitted or published over 99 papers in leading medical 
journals including the Lancet, British Medical Journal, and Nature 
Medicine among others. Specialty Supercourses are being developed, 
including Islamic, Russian, and Indian Health. WHO developed a Super-
course. Three thousand CDs have been distributed worldwide, reaching 
over 60,000 students and teachers. The course receives 3 million vis-
its a year. We have 32 mirrored servers across the world.

If you would like us to send you a free CD with 500 lectures, please 
send us a note.

Contact Person: 
Ronald E. LaPorte, Ph.D.
Director, Disease Monitoring and Telecommunications
WHO Collaborating Centre
Professor of Epidemiology
Graduate School of Public Health
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA
mailto:ronlaporte@aol.com

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