[afro-nets] Supercourse Newsletter, May 17 2004

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

Supercourse Newsletter, May 17 2004
-----------------------------------
 
http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/
 
 
Ya got to love the BMJ :
 
Gavin Yamey from the BMJ just published a wonderful article 
about the Supercourse and Telepreventive Medicine last week. Be-
low is a copy of the article. Please feel free to use part or 
all of the article by distributing this to people you know. (you 
can cut out the references to Ron LaPorte!!). We thank Gavin, 
Tony Delmothe, and Richard Smith at the BMJ. The BMJ has been 
extremely helpful for the our work, and it has been an honor to 
collaborate with them. The are on the cutting edge of using the 
Internet in publishing. Once again, thank you Gavin, Tony and 
Richard.
 
National Cancer Institute:
 
Next week we will be presenting at the National Cancer Institute 
from 11:30 to 12:30 on Tuesday May 25. There has not yet been a 
room assigned. If you are in the Washington area, we would love 
to have you come.
 
Olympic Supercourse Lecture:
 
We have about 40 people helping to develop the Olympic Super-
course Lecture. Soni?s lecture can be seen at: 
http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/lecture/lec15451/index.htm
 
Ali Ardaldin will be translating the lecture into Persian, and 
Eugene Shubnikov into Russian. We have contacted most of the 
country Olympic leaders. We may need help from some of you to 
help contact the leaders in your country.
 
We want to reach 150 countries and train a million students. We 
thought it would be really cool if we could give each student an 
Olympic-Supercourse Pin. Shabina had a great idea also of some-
thing the kids could put onto a baseball cap. Another way to do 
it virtually for free would be to distribute electronically an 
Olympic-Supercourse logo that could be iron onto a shirt. We 
would love to have your ideas.
 
Twisters!!
 
Mita has been doing a fantastic job with tornados in Kansas. 
There were just 3-4 and she rapidly put up slides for teachers 
in Kansas to use. We see that we can build in Kansas a network 
of teacher, this could be really powerful for a public health 
network.
 
We would love your advise, this is most fun. Who would have ever 
thought that the Supercourse team would be going to the Olym-
pics!!
 
Best regards from us in Pittsburgh (and other places)
 
Ron, Faina, Mita, Soni, Raina, Eric, Ali, Eugene, Julia, Kip 
Kieno, Akira, (He is he head of the Olympic commission in Nige-
ria!!),
 
--
Low back pain stinks
 
BMJ 2004;328:1158 (15 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7449.1158
 
News
Electronic Communication and Health Care
 
The professor of "telepreventive medicine"
Gavin Yamey
BMJ
 
The Supercourse website collects hundreds of lectures on public 
health delivered by a global faculty of experts. Its founder, 
Ron LaPorte, tells Gavin Yamey about running a "university with-
out walls".
 
When an earthquake hit Iran on 26 December 2003, killing over a 
third of Bam's population of 90 000 people, Ron LaPorte, profes-
sor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsyl-
vania, knew immediately what he had to do.
 
LaPorte runs the Supercourse, a freely available online library 
of about 1700 lectures on public health. Within three days, he 
and his colleagues had uploaded an authoritative lecture on the 
health consequences of earthquakes, written by Eric Noji, a 
world expert on responding to disasters.
 
Noji's lectures now sit alongside those on tornadoes, avian in-
fluenza, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, severe acute respira-
tory syndrome, and other public health crises. These lectures, 
says LaPorte, with his characteristic boyish enthusiasm, have 
"enormous potential to reduce fear and save lives."
 
All the lectures are written by members of a networked global 
community of 13 000 scientists - including six Nobel prize win-
ners­who are committed to what LaPorte calls "telepreventive 
medicine."
 
The lectures are presented in a slide format compatible with 
PowerPoint. They are aimed at "teaching the teachers" of public 
health, particularly in universities and secondary schools. 
Funded by the National Library of Medicine and the National In-
stitutes of Health, the Supercourse is managed by a team of pub-
lic health graduates based in Pittsburgh and a webmaster (who is 
also a cardiologist) in Siberia.
 
One of LaPorte's big concerns is to tackle the "information de-
ficiency" in developing countries. But there are major barriers 
to people accessing the Supercourse lectures in poor countries.
 
"Developing countries' bandwidth is so low that they can't 
download them [from the main server]. It takes 12 hours to 
download one lecture. And in China it costs two to three times 
more to surf internet sites outside the country." The answer to 
both problems was the Supercourse "mirror sites."
 
"We decided to develop a system of dropping the Supercourse into 
different [computer] systems around the world. So the same con-
tent is now on local servers." These include servers in Mongo-
lia, Sudan, Nepal, and China, mostly housed in universities or 
ministries of health.
 
To try to reach the 93% of the world's population who don't have 
internet access, a compact disc version of the Supercourse is 
distributed worldwide. "We ask everyone to copy it and spread it 
around. Every health professional in Cuba has access to it."
 
Faina Linkov, Supercourse coordinator, said that the next step 
in raising the project's profile is to use mobile phone technol-
ogy.
 
"In Ukraine, the average [monthly] salary is $100, yet everyone 
has a cell phone, and rural areas all have a television. If we 
can put a lecture into the phone, then into TV, a whole school 
district could be exposed to health information."
 
Spending time with LaPorte, you learn a whole new vocabulary of 
expressions that capture the Supercourse vision. The online lec-
tures signal "death to distance" (it doesn't matter whether a 
student is in the next classroom or the next continent). The 
lectures move away from the "sage on stage" approach to lectur-
ing, where the wise teacher pontificates in a classroom.
 
They also offer the opportunity for "mass customisation." A ge-
neric lecture on earthquakes, for example, can be rapidly tai-
lored to give local information. The Supercourse is partnering 
with the daily newspaper USA Today to provide school teachers 
with customised lectures on disasters hyperlinked to the article 
in the paper.
 
The greatest challenge in spreading health information, Laporte 
says, is "reaching the last mile." How do you reach those in the 
poorest, remotest parts of the world? One of LaPorte's more 
radical suggestions is that a community might pay people to be-
come "microinformation brokers." They would download information 
about both agriculture and health­from a computer many miles 
away­and then share their new knowledge back in the community.
 
LaPorte has come a long way from his initial experiments with 
the internet in the early 1990s. With help from the National 
Aeronautics and Space Administration, he created one of the ear-
liest internet home pages, which connected public health workers 
and captured public health links. "But I realised this wasn't 
going any place. I decided distance education was the way for-
ward."
 
A doctorate in cognitive psychology made him appreciate the ways 
in which people process information. He describes the Super-
course as a "hypertext comic book" that has recognisable icons 
and links to allow readers to "go deeper."
 
"While a journal article is linear, we can be multidimensional." 
And while it takes years for researchers to share their findings 
via medical journals, they can share them immediately by posting 
a lecture on the Supercourse.
 
But don't journals, with their peer review system, at least have 
some kind of quality control? It's a question that he finds ex-
asperating. Before being published, the global faculty reviews 
the Supercourse lectures. And after publication they are evalu-
ated by its users, a system of reviewing that mimics the suc-
cessful model used by Amazon.com.
 
"In 10 years' time, all academic lectures will be on line. Our 
role is to be a gateway, with quality control, to these lec-
tures."
 
One of the biggest challenges that the Supercourse faces is up-
dating the content.
 
Two strategies are used to "increase the shelf life of the lec-
tures." The first is encouraging several lectures on the same 
topic, allowing teachers to create their own teaching session by 
picking and choosing slides from old and new lectures.
 
The second strategy is for each lecture and each slide to have a 
"pocket" into which new comments or slides can be added.
Critics of the Supercourse would say that just disseminating 
health information isn't in itself enough to improve health. La-
Porte feels it is unfair to hold the Supercourse to a higher 
standard than university lectures - or indeed medical journals. 
"Can you show that articles in the BMJ save lives?" he asked.
 
"I don't see a problem with sending out good health informa-
tion." And given that the Supercourse gets an estimated 75 mil-
lion hits a year, its users would probably agree.
 
The Supercourse is at www.pitt.edu/~super1. To obtain CDs of the 
Supercourse, mailto:super2@pitt.edu