[afro-nets] Supercourse Newsletter Jan. 26, 2006

["Ronald E. LaPorte" <super1+@pitt.edu>]

Supercourse Newsletter Jan. 26, 2006
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http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/
 
Dear Friends,
 
We have had enormous interest in the Global Health Schools with 
90 people from 30 different countries joining in with the devel-
opment. Over the past few weeks we have begun to outline the 
curricula for a certificate program and we wanted to present 
this to you for your thoughts.
 
We also need your help, we have outlined a set of potential 
courses. We need to ?populate? the courses with lectures. We 
need people who would be interested in working as a group to go 
through the supercourse, or your Hard Drives, to build template 
courses for the Global Health Schools.
 
As discussed in our previous newsletter, we want to put the 
schools into the BEST universities within a country as honor 
colleges. These could be medical, but also non-medical. The 
teachers would be the best teachers on the faculty and we would 
provide template lectures and a global help desk to empower the 
teachers with outstanding multidisciplinary materials. The goal 
is to provide a beginning background of research skills.
 
Courses                 Hours
 
Epidemiology               3
Statistics                 3
Research design/computers  2
Health around the world    2
Selected topics            2
 
In this course we can present specialized information depending 
upon the interest of the faculty, e.g. Environmental health, or 
Psychiatric, or diabetes, or surveillance, AIDS, Avian Flu, Bam 
Earthquake, we also want to include social and economic aspects.
 
A 3 credit course would meet 3 times a week for 15 weeks or 
about 45 lectures. A 2 credit course would have 30 hours.
 
Final Project              3
 
15 total credits
 
We envisioned a global project where students would create a su-
percourse lecture about some aspect about the epidemiology of 
health in their countries. We would then create a student super-
course where students would post their lectures along with lec-
tures from other countries. In this manner each country starts 
to obtain an excellent repository of lectures about health in 
that country, and students get to see what others are doing in 
the Sudan, Russia, Japan, Kenya, etc.
 
It would be great if we could get the faculty world wide commu-
nicating with each other as well as the students.
 
We also would plan to establish global web casting of lectures 
of global health interests that could rotate monthly initially 
be the various areas across the world. This would not be re-
quired as not everyone has web casting capabilities.
 
We envision a uniform global testing procedure to award certifi-
cates.
 
We would very much appreciate your thoughts on this. We want to 
iron out most of the issues, and we have to obtain funding be-
fore we move forward.
 
Scientific Supercourse:
Recently Ismail Sergeldin, the director of the Library of Alex-
andria, Faina Linkov and several others wrote a paper where we 
argue that the Supercourse is not only the future for Preven-
tion, but also the future of all of science. We will be submit-
ting it shortly to Science, and very much value your thoughts.
 
1/26/2006 1:41 PM
?Globalization of Science Education: A Scientific Supercourse?
--------------------------------------------------------------
 
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to 
change the world. - Nelson Mandela
 
Over 2000 years ago Socrates developed the foundation for modern 
education. The power of the Socratic Method and classroom learn-
ing cannot be denied. Classroom training has beaten back many 
worthy adversaries. The printing press did not defeat classroom 
learning, instead it partnered with it. Correspondence courses 
could not replace classroom learning. Edison indicated that mo-
tion pictures would take over education. In the 1960s 7:00 AM 
college classes on TV fell by the wayside, as well as lectures 
on CD Rom. Recently dot-comers set their crosshairs on education 
yet could not take out the classroom.
 
Even now after 20 centuries the classroom has a 95% market share 
on education. The classroom may be the most important and long-
est lived Information Technology.
 
Why has the classroom not only survived but flourished? The rea-
son is that it works. Traditional distance learning is not as 
effective. Distance learning is one-size-fits all. Teaching epi-
demiology is different in the context of a Navajo Reservation, 
than in Stanford, Beijing or Baghdad. Distance learning is often 
very expensive and a money loser. Also, there is no evidence 
that distance learning is more effective than the classroom. 
There also is a fear of ?faculty downsizing? due to outsourcing. 
In 5 years there will be 10 biologists teaching all the world?s 
courses, and in 10 years none. Distance learning puts the local 
teacher in a secondary, role pushed aside by the distant 
teacher.
 
Perhaps the most important difference is that Leaders, Role Mod-
els, and Mentors can be found in the classroom teacher. It is a 
bit more difficult to find these watching a 15 inch talking 
head. It is much easier to transfer values of science, to in-
spire and motivate students by empowering the local instructor 
with good material, than students obtaining the same materials 
directly by a ?teacher is a box?. Teachers are sources of inspi-
ration and love of science, in contrast distance learning often 
focuses on certifying large numbers of persons for money. Dis-
tance learning has its role, but we believe it can never over-
take the classroom with regards to its volume taught, inspira-
tion, quality of education and cost effectiveness. We strongly 
believe in the power of the classroom however, we feel that 
classroom scientific learning can be markedly improved.
 
Wisdom begins in wonder. - Socrates
 
There is symbiotic relationship between research and teaching 
with the circulation of knowledge between the scientist who gen-
erates knowledge to teachers who disseminate it. This benefits 
all. Bright students learn from experts to become fledgling sci-
entists and researchers are challenged by young minds.
 
Scholars have twin duties of research and teaching. Recently 
this relationship has become frayed. In developed countries re-
search may not appear in classrooms for 5-7 years. Also, it is 
very difficult to teach overview courses that have thirty dif-
ferent topics as few scientists can stay current in 5 areas, let 
alone 30. In addition, it requires considerable effort to wade 
through journals, articles and books in a different field to 
construct multidisciplinary lectures for teaching; thus we re-
main in our silos. It is much easier to empower teachers by pro-
viding template PowerPoint lectures from an expert in the same 
or different field. Preparation time is reduced from 15 hours to 
2, quality is increased compared to starting from scratch and 
seasoned teachers can sprinkle courses with timely new insight 
from different disciplines. We can excite and inspire students 
about different areas of science, even those which are not our 
area of expertise.
 
For beginning teachers, there is even more need. Remember the 
first class you taught? You stood in front of a class, sweating, 
with 83 pages of notes, which were presented in 17 seconds. Why 
do we require new teachers in epidemiology, psychology, biology, 
etc. to create lectures from scratch when thousands of other 
lectures have been developed, many by world?s experts? A new 
teacher should have access to lectures from those who have gone 
before them. We have access to their writings, their books and 
their journals. Why not their Point Lectures? Template lectures 
aid students by empowering and improving teachers. As we argued 
in Nature Medicine (1), cooperation and lecture sharing reduce 
redundancy, and produces better training.
 
Many scientists in developing countries have not seen a current 
journal in 10 years making good scientific lecturing impossible. 
In addition as we presented in Nature, this could lead to a new 
scientific diplomacy, bringing scientists in Arab countries and 
others closer to scientists world wide (2). It is difficult to 
be a mentor and to inspire students when your teacher presents 
from dated materials.
 
Sharing PowerPoint lectures is a very important vehicle to im-
prove teaching but little used. PowerPoint lectures are our best 
overview of an area, and our means to communicate with students. 
We have not recognized the rapid populating of PowerPoint lec-
tures on the Internet. Only 2 years ago there were 5 million 
PowerPoint lectures on the web, now there are 25 million. We 
need to be able to harness this movement by categorizing, evalu-
ating, retrieving, quality control, open source and dissemina-
tion of these lectures to improve teaching and research. In a 
decade almost all of our lectures will be on the web, it is time 
to establish a system to use this incredible resource.
 
As said in Science ?We need to revitalize training and teaching? 
of science world wide. We need to use new approaches. Approaches 
have to be cheap, effective, sustainable and new to transform 
global scholarship. Here we present a proof of concept in one 
area of science, epidemiology, and then discuss how this can be 
used for all science.
 
Globalization of Education: The Supercourse
 
Our underlying strategy to improve global training is simple. 
Without good current materials, training has to be poor. Once we 
bring accurate and timely materials into the classrooms of the 
world, we can then build other technologies. It is impossible to 
have a good education no matter what expensive educational tech-
nology is used, if the content is old, and inaccurate. Garbage 
in, Garbage out. The goal of our Supercourse is to improve the 
scientific content of lectures world wide by sharing our best 
PowerPoint lectures.
 
Supercourse Overview (http://www.pitt.edu/~super1)
 
Question: What is the best way to improve global health train-
ing/research?
Answer: Improve lectures.
 
Question: How do we improve global health lectures:
Answer: Faculty worldwide share their best PowerPoint lectures.
 
Question: Will faculty share lectures?
Answer: Yes, The Supercourse has 31,000 faculty from 151 coun-
tries who created a Library of Lectures with 2,457 outstanding 
PowerPoint lectures on the Internet. Over 1,000 lectures were 
from outside the US.
 
We were originally funded by NASA, and then the National Library 
of Medicine. We built an open source ?Library of Lectures? with 
passionate scientific presentations. These are shared for free. 
Our research knowledge is shared via PowerPoint lectures. Power-
Point is almost universally available and potentially one of the 
best mediums for F to F (faculty to faculty) sharing of content 
(3,4).
 
The Supercourse consists of:
 
1. Open Source: Global faculty share their best PowerPoint lec-
tures on prevention. Experienced faculty members beef up their 
lectures with little struggle. New instructors reduce prepara-
tion time with better lectures. Faculty in developing countries 
use current scientific template lectures to build their own.
 
2. ?Coach? Educators: The Library of Lectures consists of excit-
ing lectures by scholars in prevention. The classroom teacher 
?takes? them out for free. Faculty who contribute lectures will 
shortly answer questions through a global help desk.
 
3. Teaching Faculty: Six Nobel Prize winners, 60 IOM members and 
other top people contributed lectures. Almost ½ are from outside 
the US.
 
4. Mirrored Servers and CDs: We have 45 mirrored servers in 
Egypt, Sudan, China, Mongolia and others. We have distributed 
20,000 Supercourse CDs to reach across the digital divide. We 
instruct people that the CDs are a gift that is meant to be 
given and request that they distribute the CDs to at least 5 
teachers in their country.
 
5. Multiple Channels: In addition to PowerPoint we are using 
multiple knowledge channels to share information including web 
and pod casting.
 
6. Teaching a Million: The best teachers should produce the best 
lectures to teach 1000s if not millions. We tested this with our 
disaster lectures and likely will teach a million students with 
a single lecture.
 
7. Just-in-Time Lectures: We created scholarly lectures within 
days after the Bam Earthquake, Kristina and Rita, and Avian Flu. 
We ?drilled? these into the classrooms of the world, reaching 
120 countries. As new scientific breakthrough occur, we can 
bring it to the classrooms of Novosibirsk, Tehran, Lima, Buffalo 
and Hanoi in days.
 
8. Quality Control: There is very little quality control in edu-
cation. We have been exploring scientifically based quality con-
trol from other disciplines.
 
9. Global Health School: We are creating ?Honda CRX? Global 
Health Schools. These are inexpensive, small, but of high qual-
ity, nimble and sustainable.
 
Progress: We published over 170 papers in Nature, Lancet, BMJ, 
Nature Medicine, PNAS among others. Our web pages have been 
identified as in the top 100 by PC Magazine. We receive 75 mil-
lion hits a year and likely teach over a million. We are the 
largest suppliers of lectures of Global Health in the world.
 
The goal is to provide the best possible template lectures over 
the Internet using Open Source system to ?beef up? the lectures 
world wide. This improves teaching with less struggle. Scien-
tists help scientists using the medium of shared PowerPoint with 
out expensive middlemen publishers. We already see enormous suc-
cess with 1000s of instructors, the teaching of up to a million 
students with a single lecture, and the collection of the best 
scientific teaching materials on prevention.
 
Scientific Supercourse:
 
We have been highly successful in improving training, research 
and collaboration in our discipline, with tens of thousands of 
academic faculty and the largest collection of scholarly scien-
tific presentations on prevention in existence. Why cannot we 
expand this to all of science and have a million faculty and 
300,000 lectures helping each other? Why not put into the Super-
course PowerPoint lectures of our recent publications? If this 
were possible then we could start to melt our scientific silos, 
thus epidemiologists could teach students about the chemistry of 
water pollution, chemists could teach about the marketing of 
products, and researchers in the Gobi desert could teach their 
students about the formation of snowflakes. In addition we can 
reduce the scientific divide between the haves and have-nots. We 
can also reduce the speed by which scientific information comes 
into the classroom from 7 years to 7 minutes.
 
We would use exactly the same approach as with our Supercourse. 
The first step would be to network scientists as we could world 
wide. The second would be to extract and share their best Power-
Point lectures. We have found that scientists are very willing 
to share their lectures, it is most gratifying.
 
Socrates was right, ?there is only one good, knowledge, and one 
evil ignorance?. With a Scientific Supercourse we can revitalize 
the teaching of science in the world and empower future genera-
tions of young Scientists.
 
 
1. Supercourse Faculty. Global Cooperation in Higher Education. 
Nature Medicine, 2000, 6, 358
 
2. Parker R. Absolute PowerPoint. New Yorker 20 May 2001;76-87.
 
3. LaPorte, RE, Linkov F, Villasenor T, Sauer, F, Gamboa C, 
Lovalekar, M, Sekikawa, A, Sa, ER. Papyrus to PowerPoint (P 2 P) 
metamorphosis of scientific communication. Brit Med J 2002;325: 
1478-1481
 
4. Husseini A., Saad R, LaPorte RE Health Supercourse to end 
Arab Isolation. Nature 2002 4127;778.
 
--
Best Regards from Pittsburgh, the home of the Pittsburgh 
Steelers: Go Steelers, beat the Sea Gulls!
 
Ron, Faina, Eugene, Soni, Francois, Mita, Saida, Ismail, Rania, 
Julia, MD, Socrates