Oct. 2, 1997
Specific Aims: A global course is being established by scientists world wide to improve the teaching of epidemiology/public health and telecommunications. It is designed to train medical, computer science, dental, veterinary, public health, pharmacy, etc. students in all countries. The course can also be used in Ministries of Health other health areas, as well as Ministers of Telecommunications and the computer industry
Significance: During the last century in developed as well as developing countries there has been a 25 year increase in life expectancy. It has been estimated that 24 of the 25-year increase were the result of public health/prevention. Epidemiology is the science of public health. Most of public health and epidemiology is information transfer. There has been a revolution in information technology; the Internet leads this change. If epidemiology and the Internet were to converge, this could lead to continued improvements in global health into the 21st century.
One of the primary areas for improving health is improving training in the areas of epidemiology/public health and the Internet. Currently the training in epidemiology and public health/prevention worldwide is woefully inadequate. Often medical, nursing and other health related schools do not even have an epidemiology course, despite the fact that epidemiology is at the core of improved national and global health through prevention. Where epidemiology and public health courses are taught often they are some of the least favorite courses, as students cannot see the relevance to them or to health. In addition, there is almost no training on the use of the Internet in health. Moreover individuals in technical areas of training or work (e.g. computer science, industry) have almost no exposure to potential applications in the area of the prevention of disease.
The Global Health Network recently recognized that a cutting edge Internet based course could be developed which would vastly improve access and interest for health professionals in the areas of Epidemiology, the Internet and Global Health.
Description of the Course:
The course currently has 4 lectures available (http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/lecture1). All the lectures are numbered consecutively, e.g. /lecture2, /lecture3. We plan to have 16 lectures available by 1/1/98. The lectures are of the format of "hypertext comic book". This is the format of employing Power Point slides with hypertext links. The links lead to information in other lectures or to the web itself. Everything will be web based. The course is developed according to cognitive psychology theories. The Power Point figures can be downloaded. There are lectures by leading experts in epidemiology and telecommunications.
An instructor can decide to use one of the lectures, some of the lectures, or all of the lectures. The lectures can serve as a course unto itself, or can supplement existing courses, in epidemiology or outside of epidemiology. For example, frequently in a course on diabetes and its complications there will be a lecture on epidemiology. The lectures can also be used in telecommunications training as a health application. A course on telecommunications could describe the application of the Internet for monitoring disease.
The course is designed to be sustainable thus it is not targeted exclusively to developed countries. For example, we already have interest by 5 different groups in Africa to use the course, or review lectures. Moreover, there will be at least 2 lectures coming from Africa. We have at least 2 lectures from Asia, and two from Latin America.
We have people who potentially will translate the lectures into Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, German, and 4 African Languages. After the initial peer review of the 4 lectures, we will commence the translation process.
The texts for the course will be Statistics at Square 1, Epidemiology for the Uninitiated, the ABCs of Medical Statistics, Introduction to the Internet and How to Read a Paper. All of these we be on the Internet and are provided for free by the British Medical Association. We appreciate the BMA for allowing us to have access to these.
All lectures will be peer reviewed prior to inclusion. We currently have over 150 epidemiologists and technical experts providing input. On each lecture there is an appraisal form. This is important, as all students taking the course worldwide will also be able to evaluate the course. A continuous quality appraisal mechanism based upon Deming principles has been set up. As soon as each lecture is reviewed, the rating and the comments are assessed to determine if the ratings have changed. The lessons learned from each lecture will be applied to the same lecture given the next time, and for general comments, to the total lecture series.
We are working out the technical details as with the Internet, and figures sometimes are slow to appear. We have seen that in the initial lectures it is possible to speed up the appearance of the figures. We have offers from sites in Japan and Africa to set up mirrored servers. We are also investigating the possibility that one could click onto a button and all figures would be transferred to ones hard disc. Thus one would be in the fast text-only mode on the Internet, but one would bring up figures from the hard disc, which would dramatically speed the process. If you were interested in helping to work out some of the technical details with us, we would appreciate your help. We want to develop this using the latest Internet technologies.
The content of the lectures is designed to have pizzazz. We only want lectures written by people who have a passion for that topic. If a person loves an area, this is transmitted to the students as well, and excites them. The goal of the course is to inform and EXCITE the students across the world about this area. We plan to have things like CNN lectures where should there be a major disaster, "Supercourse" will be there to develop a lecture as the disaster, or outbreak evolves. For example, Mad Cow disease would have been a natural. Alternatively, the new IBM Chip, a lecture could be produced as to what it is, and what it means for the Internet and Global Health. In it the people directly doing the work would help to develop the lecture.
The Interactive Internet is a powerful medium. We plan to have the students from across the world to talk with each other, and potentially collect some global data together as has been done with NASA, with Project Globe and the Internet. Also, we will try to develop meet the professor and have students ask questions of the professor. We will have all students create an individual home page, as once they do this, they know much about the Internet, and each other.
We currently have an interest and support from over 10 other WHO Collaborating Centers from across the world, and several Public Health Associations. We want their backing as eventually we want this to be a course that is recognized by WHO, ITU, PAHO, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank as one of the first super courses. To do this we need content, technical skills and expert input.
The method for credits will be to list the
contributions of each author alphabetically. Thus:
Armstrong, Mary Reviewer of Lecture 1, Developer of
lecture 2
British Medical Association, Provider of texts
Internet Research Information Server, Corp., providers of
Mirrored servers in Thailand, Russia, and Bolivia
This course currently has NO budget. We are doing it because we strongly believe that the improvements in information technology can transform the health of all of our countries, especially through Internet based education. It can be developed with Global Participation from experts in Health, Telecommunications, and Global Health. We would like to have you participate to review lectures, to develop lectures, to suggest cutting edge ideas to reach students in health and telecommunications, to provide access for mirrored servers, for translation into many other languages, etc. We would appreciate if you could distribute this to public health and telecommunication lists around the world.
We are, of course, scientists who are developing this course. We therefore plan to write a series of papers describing the development of this course. If you were sufficiently involved with the course we would like to have you participate on papers as an author that would be published in the epidemiology, technology and global health literature.
This supercourse can be a very important model for courses in other disciplines. We very much would value your input.
Ronald LaPorte, Ph.D.,
For the Global Health Network
(http://www.pitt.edu/HOME/GHNet/GHNet.html)Director, Disease Monitoring and Telecommunications
WHO Collaborating Center
Professor of Epidemiology
Graduate School of Public HealthUniversity of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15261
USA
FAX 412 692 8329