Supercourse Newsletter - March 31, 2001
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Dear Friends,
Lectures, we have lectures, we have lots and lots of lectures:
Wow!! Another Supercourse barrier crossed.
We have just counted up all the lectures provided to the Supercourses
world-wide. We have cracked the 400 lecture goal. There now have been
404 lectures available. This is quite an accomplishment by the Super-
course faculty. It is very exciting to see the number of lectures be-
come larger and larger. Also, seeing the Supercourse model "sprout"
into new areas is very gratifying.
Clearly we have developed something unique. Our collection system has
proven to be very successful. In addition, the lecture distribution
system with the CDs has worked way beyond anything we have thought
with most people who have received the CDs providing these to others
to copy. The 1,600 CDs have multiplied the course to many PCs around
the world. The next step will be to target September to develop the
third stage of the Supercourse, utilization. We would like your
thoughts at to how we can have more people use the lectures in teach-
ing. It would be wonderful if you could present a lecture on the Su-
percourse to your faculty.
Macs: Ronan M Conroy <rconroy@rcsi.ie>, Lecturer in Biostatistics at
the Royal College of Surgeons has been very helpful. Ronan is prepar-
ing a Mac version for the Supercourse CD. Thank you.
We have tried to have the CD distributed in the packets for people
attending the excellent Epidemiology 2001 Conference in Toronto
<http://www.epi2001.org/>\. Disappointingly the organizers did not
feel they could afford to distribute the CDs ($0.75 per CD, >$300.00
registration fee) and they suggested that we sell the CDs to partici-
pants. If there are any up-coming meetings that you think the CD
could be distributed for free to discuss the Supercourse with the or-
ganizers.
Boris Ledoshchuk from Kiev, Ukraine is providing to us a beautiful
series of lectures on Radiation Epidemiology. Eugene Shubnikov a mem-
ber of the Supercourse team is processing these for the Supercourse.
Digital Divide: We have been thinking about the digital divide. It is
interesting that only about 2.5% of the world has direct access to
the internet, in developing countries, it is way less. We have been
talking about this with people at the World Bank. The problem in part
is that we will never reach every person world wide direct, or even a
small percentage of them. However, by reaching the teachers we can
transfer internet technology into traditional information and educa-
tional technology and reach a much greater percentage of the world.
Statistical Quality Control: A major problem on the web is what you
can believe, and to maintain quality. The approach that we are taking
with Deming Based Statistical Quality control is a new approach where
we apply technology from QA in Industry to that of lecture quality
monitoring. Jane Harvill, Ph.D. is an expert in this area and is
working with Fan Zhou, M.D., to develop new statistical quality con-
trol procedure for use in lecture monitoring. If you are interested
in joining this effort, please contact us. SQC for lectures, or in
fact any web contact my revolutionize web quality control as it has
with the improvements in Toyota and the car industry in general.
Ron, Akira, Eun Ryoung, Benjamin, Faina, Ying, Fan, Beatriz, Eugene,
Deb, Tom, Yue Fang
mailto:super3+@pitt.edu
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