Epidemiology course on the Internet
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Friends,
quite a few things have been happening. I wanted to talk with you about the
development of an Internet based Epidemiology/Statistics/Internet course
that we plan to develop and distribute for free to medical and public
health schools, as well as ministries of health.
Tom Songer from our WHO Collaborating Center has taken the lead in the
development of distance learning. There is a critical need for better
training in epidemiology and the use of the Internet for medical, and
public health students, as well as public health officials from the
Ministry of Health down to the local health department. In addition, people
trained in telecommunications are needed in public health, so if we can
teach them in the internet, this can have a major global effect on health.
We therefore propose to develop a set of classes developed by faculty world
wide, and we would like to see if you would be interested in class
development both in epidemiology and Internet, or in helping to review
content.
If there is difficulty in bringing your class to the Internet, we can have
this set up. We will be using what we call the hypertext comic book
format...
This is where you create slides in a graphics program such as 'Powerpoint',
add text to them, and hypertext links. This is then put directly on the
Internet.
In a typical course there are 30 lectures, we would provide 50 lectures,
and the local person selects 0-50 lectures to include. If there is
difficulty in internet access, we can help to set up a mirrored server in
the country, the classes can also be set up on CD, and the slides down
loaded to 35 mm.
In each region, say for Latin America a steering committee can help to
guide the class based upon local circumstances.
We want to do what John Patrick from IBM has suggested, that of an
Interactive Internet, so that the students work with the data and work to
learn by interaction how to use the Internet.
The classes can be regionally developed, as well, such as the public health
problems in Latin America are different than those in Mongolia. However,
students need to be exposed to many different areas.
We would propose to develop CNN type of lectures as well... Thus should
there be another earthquake in Kobe, we would create a lecture as the
events unfold, and have the students talk through the internet to the
people there.
We have asked the British Medical Journal if we could put up the ABCs of
statistics which is a great statistics overview. There is a very nice
PAHO/WHO Epidemiology book that we plan to see if we can put on the
Internet. There is a lot of how to use the Internet information in Web
sites, so this should not be a problem. If you know of good reference
links for basic epidemiology readings, let us know.
We think we can get a course up and running by January 1998 and translated
into English, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish. We want to get the world's
experts in telecommunication as well as public health involved with this.
There is no reason that we cannot start to improve the health of the world
in the 21st century by training the next health generation...
Please forward this to people on various lists, in you company...e.g. IBM,
NTT, KTT, Ministries of Health, etc... so that we can get a pool of people
thinking on how best to develop this...
thanks...
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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