Supercourse: Translation from Research to the Classroom

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R E V I E W A R T I C L E

1. Introduction: Translational Research

Defined

During the past decade, a new model of health research and care has been emerging, that of translational re-search. Translational research has typically been defined in many different ways, but in general, it focuses on the clinical application of scientific medical research, from the lab to the bedside (ccnt.hsc.usc.edu/glossary/). However, translational research has many different meanings and is difficult to have an umbrella definition

for this broad term. Finding a definition of “transla-tional research” is similar to defining the word “game”, which can be a card game, video, football, wild animals hunted for food or sport, and so on. It is difficult to put a finger on “game”, as it is to put a finger on “translational research”.

We have been developing systems to translate science into the classroom. The focus of this form of translational research has been little examined, but is fundamental to all of science, health and education. This article de-scribes approaches to translation of information into

During the past decade, a new model of health research and care has taken hold, that of translational research. However, translational research has many different nuances and it is difficult to have an umbrella definition. Our focus has been the translation of research to the classroom. The focus of translational research has been little investigated, but is funda-mental to all of science and health. At the University of Pittsburgh, we have been develop-ing systems to translate science into the classroom usdevelop-ing a model called the Supercourse. Supercourse is a library of over 4100 lectures on public health and medicine shared for free by more than 65,000 members of the Global Health Network from over 170 countries. Translation of knowledge into the classrooms is done via the transfer of PowerPoint mod-ules around the world. We have been particularly concerned with the lack of training of medical, public health and nursing schools for global health and prevention. The Library of Alexandria, the World Health Organization in Geneva, and our WHO Collaborating Center at the University of Pittsburgh have been distributing Supercourse DVDs to address the lack of preventive training in both developed and developing countries.

Received: Sep 7, 2009 Revised: Oct 1, 2009 Accepted: Oct 4, 2009 KEY WORDS: education; Internet; primary prevention; telemedicine

Supercourse: Translation from Research to

the Classroom

Ronald LaPorte

1

*, Wen-Ta Chiu

2

, Lu Chie

3

, Mazen Zenatims

1

, Yingyun Yang

3

,

Anna Sevilla

4

, Rupali Kumar

1

, Meredith Hennon

1

, Faina Linkov

5

1_{Department of Epidemiology, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA} 2_{Graduate Institute of Injury Prevention and Control, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan}

3_{Peking Union Medical College, Beijing, China}

4_{University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, New Jersey, USA} 5_{Cancer Institute, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA}

*Corresponding author. Department of Epidemiology, Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. E-mail: ronlaporte@aol.com

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Supercourse: from research to classroom 9 the world’s classrooms that have been developed as a

part of the Global Health Network Supercourse effort.

2. Traditional Approaches to Education and

Information Translation

The traditional approach of translating science to class-room education is where school teachers or college pro-fessors are expected to read books and journals, and then build PowerPoint slides for presentations to stu-dents. This system is not very effective, as all of us active scientists know that it typically takes 4−5 years for our work to filter into the classrooms. Our medical, public health and nursing schools are using outdated materials. This is not because faculty members lack initiative in get-ting updated textbooks. In the area of “too many materi-als”, we have seen an explosion of scientific knowledge in the past 50 years. If one is teaching a basic overview course on immunology or epidemiology, there are typi-cally 30 different topics. It is impossible to keep up with five different fields, let alone 30. At the opposite extreme, the cost of journals has skyrocketed. Educators in re-source-poor universities or countries have little access to new materials; therefore, their teaching suffers as well.

There has been much talk about translation or improving education through advanced distance

learn-ing, where experts teach students half a world away.

Thus, experts on different topics are used in what some have called global universities. We have argued that this will never occur, as these systems are expensive, inefficient, and are not empowering the local instruc-tors. Currently, over 98% of the teaching worldwide oc-curs in the classroom by local teachers; thus, classroom teaching is still the major mode of teacher and student interaction. In 20 years, it may be 95%, but it is still ex-pected to be high. There are some major disadvantages to traditional distance learning. One is cost—the cost of distance learning can often be US$10−100 per student per hour. This is well beyond the reach of all but the richest countries. There is a more fundamental problem. If you the expert were to do distance learning teaching to Nigeria, you are doing the teaching, not the local teachers. There is little sustainability in this model; once the money is gone, the training will likely be too.

Ideally, we would like to have a system that makes local teachers better teachers. We have developed such a system called the Supercourse, which is a form of

advanced classroom learning. In advanced classroom

learning, we aim to improve the medical and public health education of millions of students worldwide, but at a fraction of the cost of traditional distance learning.

Our concept is simple. The fundamental core to good teaching is high quality and readily usable content. If we as educators do not have good, up-to-date content, then it does not matter how well we present the material. To improve education in health, the surest way is to

provide easily usable up-to-date content to the teachers of the world.

3. Supercourse: Emerging Alternatives to

Traditional Distance Learning

Our group at the University of Pittsburgh has been developing a simple model to improve translation of information to classrooms, that of the Supercourse (www.pitt.edu/∼super1/). The Supercourse represents a Network of 65,000 leading academic faculty from 172 countries.1−5 From the network, we collect their best PowerPoint lectures and store them in an open-source, free lecture library. The Supercourse library of lectures is similar to free libraries, but instead of sharing books, we share PowerPoint educational modules or lectures. The lectures are fed back to the network for use in teaching their students.

The Supercourse lectures target global health and prevention.6 This area was chosen as there is a bur-geoning interest in preventive medicine as opposed to curative medicine. Through the Supercourse library of lectures, we can distribute public health and preven-tion knowledge. Moreover, there is very little teaching on global health and prevention in medical schools worldwide. In 6 years of training in India or Libya, typi-cally there might be only 1−2 hours training in global health and prevention.

PowerPoint has some important attributes for shar-ing scientific knowledge from the scientists to the classroom. Twenty years ago, when many of us began to teach, we used a chalk board. At the end of the class, we erased the board, destroying our lectures. Now, with PowerPoint slides available on the web, a scien-tific paper presented at a scienscien-tific meeting can be used in the classrooms of Argentina within minutes. In addition, the storage mode for the lecture is also PowerPoint; thus, if one uses a PowerPoint lecture from the web, it is easy to use and can be manipulated. Slides can be easily shared between lectures.

In addition, PowerPoint has become an almost uni-versal language, with children in grade school being able to use it.5 It is thus easy to share scientific knowl-edge using the medium of PowerPoint slides. Some have argued that we should use open source presenta-tion programs,7 but few of us know how to use them, whereas almost all of us are familiar with PowerPoint.

Using the Supercourse is simple. Suppose you wanted to give a presentation on diabetes in Taiwan. You may select six slides from Peter Bennett, eight from Paul Zimmet, four from Trevor Orchard, and eight from yourself. You thus combine the knowledge and slides from global experts to forge your own lecture.

We have never received any funding from Microsoft, nor do we appreciate some of their actions. However, PowerPoint is powerful.

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10 R. LaPorte et al In the sections that follow, we provide an update

on the Supercourse and describe some of our recent efforts.

4. Supercourse Update 2009

The Supercourse has taken off. As indicated earlier, we have created a network of 65,000 faculty from almost every country in the world. There are over 4100 lectures, many from highly distinguished scientists including Nobel Laureates, the former directors of the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Ministers of Health. We ask educators to provide us with their best lectures. There are 31 differ-ent languages represdiffer-ented. For example, on our main Supercourse server in Pittsburgh, we have 452 lectures that have been translated into Spanish, 323 lectures that have been translated into Chinese, 220 Russian-language lectures, and 59 lectures in Arabic.

Worldwide, there are 42 different mirrored servers of the Supercourse. A mirrored server is a copy of the Supercourse content on a local computer. Thus, a sci-entist in Nepal, Mongolia or Egypt can connect and search for lectures much quicker using a local server, rather than having to connect to our main server in Pittsburgh. Using the mirror server approach, we re-duce the bandwidth problem. Our lectures have proven to be quite successful: 20−30% of the lectures have Google page rankings in the top 10 out of, in some cases, millions. We have collected 10,000 lecture review surveys, and our average ranking is 4.2/5, with the modal score of 5. It appears that the lectures are viewed as being of very high quality.

There has been quite a high utilization rate of the lectures. We have created what we call the “golden lec-ture of prevention”, which synthesizes the concept of prevention.6_{This lecture has likely been presented to}

more than 200,000 students worldwide. This may be one of the most viewed PowerPoint lectures in health. In addition, the Supercourse mirrored server at the Library of Alexandria receives over 8 million hits a year, and the overall Supercourse over 80 million. Last year, our lectures were taught to over 1 million students. Our work is constantly evolving. An overview of all of our directions can be found at www.pitt.edu/∼super1/. Our recent work includes two major areas: networking and sharing Supercourse with medical, public health and nursing schools.

5. Reaching Out to Medical, Public Health

and Nursing Schools

We have been particularly concerned with the lack of training on global health and prevention in medical, public health and nursing schools. The Library of

Alexandria, the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, and our WHO Collaborating Center are working together to deliver prevention knowledge to medical, nursing, and public health schools around the world. During the next 2 years, we aim to double the amount of training in the area of global health and prevention in schools of health.

To accomplish this goal, we have created a Library of Alexandria DVD that contains 3600 of our Supercourse lectures. Our goal is to provide this DVD to as many faculty and students as possible. To accomplish this goal, the Library of Alexandria has produced 4000 cop-ies. We provide a single DVD to individuals who pledge to make at least 50 copies. The DVDs are thus free, but they are not a gift for the initial recipient only. They are a gift that is meant to be given.

WHO has been extremely supportive of this effort. We delivered 1700 Supercourse DVDs to WHO, and they have sent these to the regional centers [e.g. Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), South-East Asia Regional Office (SEARO), Africa Regional Office (AFRO)]. From the regional centers, the DVDs were distributed to the national centers and incorporated into their librar-ies. The national centers then distributed the DVDs to surrounding medical, public health, and nursing schools as well as libraries.

6. Just in Time Lectures (JIT)

Since the events of September 11, 2001, our group has been regularly developing JIT lectures on various natu-ral and man-made disasters, e.g. on events like the epidemiology of fear after the September 11 attacks, the Bam earthquake in 2003, the Asian Tsunami in 2004, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

When H1N1 broke out in Mexico, the Supercourse network was notified 2−3 hours after the first case was diagnosed, indicating the need for a JIT lecture. We found one of the world’s experts on flu, and then mobi-lized 40 people in 30 different countries to translate and spread the word. In 24 hours, we had created a state-of-the-art lecture. Within 3 days, it had been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew and seven other languages. Each lecture was updated 12 times in the ensuing 2 weeks. The lecture was targeted to reduce the “epidemiology of fear”. Importantly, in China, the most popular TV station, CCTV, presented our lecture and our chief collaborator. The lecture reached an as-tounding 50,000,000 people (www.pitt.edu/∼super1/). We are exploring the Supercourse media link in Russia, and would like to develop this in Latin America also.

We have developed a NATO-funded workshop on scientific networking and the Supercourse. We hope to build a larger disaster network in order to rapidly pro-vide the best possible information to people world-wide, through schools and the media.

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Supercourse: from research to classroom 11

7. Conclusions

The Supercourse group is actively working to translate the information from research labs to classrooms by utilizing inexpensive and ubiquitous Internet path-ways. In addition to the activities outlined above, we are building a Network of Deans to help us share this information among medical, public health and nursing schools. A group of more than 30 young people from Syria, Egypt, Israel, Cuba, the U.S., among other coun-tries, are identifying all the deans around the world. This will be an important network where we can chan-nel lectures through to faculty and students. If you are interested in joining the network or helping us to build new networks in your country, please e-mail us at super1@pitt.edu.

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