Epidemiology Course on the Internet (21)
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Dear friends, we have been a bit overwhelmed with the response to our
proposed supercourse. We are creating a list server which should be
available in the next few days. There are over 120 people who ex-
pressed an interest in participating in the development of the
course, over 30 of which were interested in writing lectures.
We wanted to have you opinion on several issues:
Credit:
Nothing can kill a project like this more than people trying to take
primary credit. The approach we have been taking with our interna-
tional work is to list on the front page the primary developers, e.g.
those who write lectures, do some of the Internet work, organize the
translation, etc....We plan to list each person by country, with the
country alphabetized. Thus, Ron LaPorte, would be under the US...
waaaay down the list (people from Albania do the best!!!).
We will create an individual home page if you do not have one, with
your picture and short biographical sketch. We will also provide a
list of "credits" like you see in the movies describing your role. In
this manner we get around all the stupid hassles of authorship. If we
get this off the ground, I will be darn proud to be the 194th
author!!!
For each of the individual lectures on the front page we will put
your picture, and once again a link to your CV. I am requesting also
for the lectures that you include 2-3 paragraphs as to why you are
excited about that particular topic. We in epidemiology love this
stuff, others find it boring...we should be able to get people just
as excited as us.
We have 1 lecture up, and will put the other two in the next day or
so. We want to set up a peer review system for each lecture. We will
collect a little background information so that say if we wanted a
rating by only those currently teaching an epidemiology course, we
could pull this out.
My philosophy of the course is that 98% of the students think that
epidemiology is boring...we do not...So, I want you and I to provide
lectures on the areas that you think have the most pizzaz. I do not
really care if a student knows how to do an odds ratio...I want stu-
dents to feel the power of our field for improving the health of the
world. I suspect that not all people will have this philosophy, but
I want the students to go through at least 1/2 of the lectures and
say...hmmmm, isn't that fascinating... as we find these research ar-
eas so fascinating.
The lectures we developed were: Introduction to Epidemiology, the
Internet and Global Health, the Epidemiologic transition, monitoring
disease and the epidemiology of childhood diabetes.
We use a hypertext comic book format, which is powerpoint slides put
onto the web with hyperlinks embedded into the slides. Akira Seki-
kawa, Rimei Nishimura, and Benjamin Acosta spent a long time develop-
ing the technology for this.
When you view the slides if you are not in the US it is very likely
that they will come down very slowly. You may have to just look at
the slides in text mode. We are in the process of lining up mirrored
servers, for example we have several under discussion in Japan. Once
we have a mirrored server then the slides will come down very
quickly.
Well, we are all a little nervous, one has to be crazy to think that
they can get a bunch of global scientists working together. We have
been enormously pleased with the responses we have gotten.
In the next few days after you see the initial presentations we will
contact you to see who might be interested in writing a lecture.
Thank you very much, this could be very important in starting the
next generation forward.
Ronald LaPorte, Ph.D.
Director Disease Monitoring and Telecommunications
WHO Collaborating Center
Professor of Epidemiology
Graduate School of Public Health
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA, 15261, USA
mailto:RLAPORTE@vms.cis.pitt.edu
http://www.pitt.edu/HOME/GHNet/GHNet.html
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