AFRO-NETS> Supercourse Newsletter, March 5 2003

[Ron LaPorte <super1+@pitt.edu>]

Supercourse Newsletter, March 5 2003
------------------------------------

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

Dear Friends,

Real Jobs:

I am sorry I have not had a chance to send a newsletter. I had to 
spend more time on the job that I get paid for. Isn't that sad? Dur-
ing the past 3 weeks we submitted 4 NIH grants. The last one was on 
the building of a Cancer Translation Supercourse. There were 31 of 
our membership who joined this. If you would like a copy of this can-
cer grant, please send a message: mailto:Super1@pitt.edu

Incredible Progress:

During the past few weeks there has been enormous progress in the 
collection of lectures. We currently have 1,219 lectures, beyond our 
wildest dreams. Rania Saad from Egypt contributed a new concept in 
lectures, that of Poison lectures that are targeted to training field 
personnel. The lectures will also be in Arabic. It is amazing as in 
the original NIH grant 3 years ago we thought that we would have only 
200 lectures in a period of 4 years, now we have 6 times as many. It 
shows how people in prevention will share their work, and it is beau-
tiful.

Jan's Party:

Jan's promotion party was wonderful. We thank our friends world wide 
for making it so great. Here at the University of Pittsburgh, the 
chancellor, Mark Nordenberg, the Senior Vice Chancellor, Art Levine 
and Dean of our Graduate School, Bernie Goldstein were wonderful in 
that they personally signed a portrait of the Cathedral of Learning 
(the largest building on campus) for Jan. We then had everyone else 
sign at the party. We collected 16 desserts from our friends world 
wide. Caremen Mcvarelas sent 3 beautiful Spanish desserts, one of 
which flooded your mind with taste. Michele Micazang lead us to 
French Desserts, Max Pietroma found for us Sicilian Cassata. Birgit 
Rami guided us to Sacher Torts in Vienna. Akira Sekikawa brought to 
us Kyoto desserts (very sweet), EunRyoung Sa sent Korea rice cakes 
and German cookies (Her fiancé, Gunther Eysenbach, is German). Daniel 
Agostini sent Choccolata Scorra which is a fantastic chocolate bark 
from Bologna. Benjamin Acosta contributed Marias Gamesa cookies that 
every children eats in Mexico with a caramel sauce. These were the 
first desserts in the Americans, having been brought by the Spanish. 
A great friend Nat Mass guided us to the best cheese cake and Mud Pie 
in NYC. Evelyn Talbot brought a fantastic burnt almond tort from 
Pittsburgh. My sister, Susan Bennett sent a beautiful flower arrange-
ment to Jan and the party. It was a fun party, and we are all very 
happy that so many people could attend. If you would like to see pic-
tures of the party, please send a note to <Super1@pitt.edu>. Once 
again, congratulations to Jan for her becoming a professor.

Who we are:

We have been moving at a furious pace, more and more people have 
joined, and lectures (and desserts) have been rolling in. We are per-
haps the first and largest global training system, not only in 
health, but any discipline. We have therefore included at the end a 
short abstract that describes who we are and what we have been doing 
as we establish perhaps the first successful system of high quality 
open source global training. Please distribute this abstract to any 
people how might be interested, in your department, in your family, 
in your state or prefecture or in your country. 

Best regards from Pittsburgh, thanks for all your help with Jan's 
party. 

Ron, Jan, Faina, Mita, EunRyoung, Eugene, Akira, Soni, Rania, Julia, 
Abed, Wendy, Tom, Deb
mailto:super1+@pitt.edu



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Mar. 2003

Globalization of Prevention Education: the 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.

Question: Will faculty share lectures? 
Answer: Yes, The Supercourse has 9300 faculty from >7500 universities 
from 148 countries who created an open source Library of Lectures 
with 1219 lectures available on the Internet for free. 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 an Internet Library of Lectures with passionate lectures in 
epidemiology, global health and the Internet. Our program consists 
of:
1. Shareware: A Global faculty is developing and sharing their best, 
most passionate lectures. This benefits all. The experienced faculty 
member can beef up old lectures. New instructors reduce preparation 
time and improve their lectures, using state of the art lecture tem-
plates 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 ex-
citing template lectures by academic prevention experts in the field. 
It is targeted to the teacher, not the student. 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 stu-
dents 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, former 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. A noble prize 
winner, Josh Lederberg has also contributed a lecture as well as the 
director of the American Cancer Society.

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

10. Leapfrogging the Disability Divide: Most prevention information 
is inaccessible to those who are disabled. We will have all of our 
lectures accessible to those who are disabled.

We have submitted or published over 110 papers in leading medical 
journals including the Lancet, British Medical Journal, Nature and 
Nature Medicine among others. Specialty Supercourses are being devel-
oped, including Islamic, Russian, and Indian Health. WHO developed a 
Supercourse. Ten thousand CDs have been distributed worldwide, reach-
ing over 60,000 students and teachers. The course receives 40-100 
million hits a year. We have 35 mirrored servers across the world.

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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