









Is the Supercourse useful for Latin America?


Is the Supercourse useful for Latin America?



Nicolas Padilla-Raygoza1, Faina Linkov2,
Eugene Shubnikov3, Ron E. LaPorte4,
Rosalina Diaz-Guerrero1



1Departament of Nursing and Obstetrics, Division
of Health Sciences and
Engineering, Campus Celaya Salvatierra, University of Guanajuato;
2Division of Cancer Prevention and Population
Science, University of
Pittsburgh Cancer Institute; 3Institute of
Internal Medicine,
Novosibirsk, Russian Federation; 4Department of
Epidemiology, Graduate
School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute



Abstract



Background: The success of the Supercourse showed
that the effort was
needed in Latin America. But would a Spanish language version be better
for the region?
Methods: Google Analytics was used to determine
website usage. A custom
evaluation form was created to get user feedback on the usefulness of
both the English language and Spanish language Supercouse lectures.
Results: Over a year's span from June 2009 to June
2010 there were
257,403 unique visits and 448,939 page views. The overall average
rating of lectures was 4.87 with the Spanish language lectures getting
even higher ratings.
Conclusion: Supercourse lectures in Spanish were a
great success in
Latin America. This success shows the need for this information and
similar success could be found in Central Asia.



Keywords: Supercourse, Education, Latin America



Introduction



The Global Health Network Supercourse project was launched in the late
1990’s to help with the difficult task of providing high quality
teaching materials to instructors of the world who wanted to teach
about global health and prevention (www.pitt.edu/~super1).
The
Supercourse group argued that cooperation in higher health education
was needed to prevent duplicate efforts and a waste of resources.1
In
addition, it has been found that the vast majority of the materials
used in classes were at least 5 years old, which is far behind the fast
pace of science. Thus, the Supercourse was developed in order to speed
up the translation of research information from labs to classrooms.
This initiative was originally supported by NASA and the National
Institutes of Health and it had great success, reaching 174 countries
of the world.
In the mid 2000’s the Supercourse effort started to spread to the
countries of Central Asia as well as Mexico. As these efforts spread in
these two very different geographic areas, we found that the challenges
were surprisingly similar: a lack of English skills among local faculty
members, a lack of time, and simply low awareness about this global
effort. Thus, we view the development of the Supercourse in Mexico and
Central Asia as sister efforts. 



The Supercourse model empowers public health teachers worldwide by
offering more than 4700 high quality lectures free of charge,
distributing them through the Internet and via DVDs, with the
invitation to join and expand the network. One of the main goals of the
Supercourse is to help professors and instructors diminish the time
spent developing a lecture for his or her class through the
availability of the slides of lectures in the Supercourse.2
Thus, a
teacher could use 5 slides from an expert in cancer, 10 from an expert
in diabetes, and 8 of their own. The “recycling” of slides markedly
improves the quality of lectures, as the slides come from the world’s
experts, as well as the efficiency, as one does not have to make slides
and lectures from scratch. Moreover, as the majority of the slides are
developed in leading academic institutions, they are quite up to date.



The Supercourse remains a very active and highly visited website today.
In the first step of project development, the Supercourse team
established a network of collaborators, then began to collect lectures
from recognized authors from the University of Pittsburgh. Little by
little, it grew until it reached approximately 50,000 faculty members
in 174 countries, with Nobel Prize laureates in Medicine donating
several lectures to the Supercourse.3 Through collaboration with the
network of scientists in Mexico, the Supercourse website and its
materials became accessible to Spanish speaking faculty members. Under
the direction of Nicolas Padilla, a new version of the Supercourse has
successfully been built: the Latin American Supercourse (www.feoc.ugto.mx/super/curso.php).




The initial success of the Supercourse was demonstrated by the number
of daily site hits and the search tools in Google®, where the lectures
from the Supercourse are in the first ten among millions of results,
and at one point receiving recognition as one of the top webpages in
the area of health by PCMagazine as well as Science Magazine.3
Eight years ago, the School of Nursing and Obstetrics of Celaya, from
the University of Guanajuato, Mexico, began to translate some lectures
from English to Spanish in order to overcome the language barrier and
to ensure that global health knowledge reaches more health
professionals in Spanish speaking countries, including those of Latin
America.



Health professionals in Latin American countries have little or no
access to continuing education materials in the field of public health
because of high costs, the need to travel, a lack of English language
skills, etc. This is especially true when it comes to obtaining
training in global health and prevention, as medical schools
traditionally focus on clinical work. The Supercourse and the Latin
American Supercourse overcome this difficulty because materials are
updated and offered via the Internet free of charge. The Supercourse
uses low bandwidth technology, allowing for easy access in regions with
slow or expensive Internet connections.
Because of the growing interest in Spanish language content, the next
logical step was to launch the Latin American Supercourse on
Epidemiology, Internet and Global Health on May 3th, 2007.4
Lectures
chosen for translation into Spanish were those that were identified to
be the most valuable for Spanish speaking faculty members in Celaya,
Mexico. The goal of this paper is to report the progress of the
development of the Latin American Supercourse and to explore
preliminary data about its usage. It is our belief that our findings
will have very interesting implications for the countries of Central
Asia and that our study can encourage the development of similar
assessments in the region.



Methods



Website utilization: Google Analytics




Google Analytics (GA) has been used to collect basic information about
the utilization of the Supercourse website in terms of number of visits
per country, per language, etc. GA is a free service offered by Google
that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. GA
is currently in use at around 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites.
GA can track visitors from all referrers, including search engines,
display advertising, pay-per-click networks, email marketing, and
digital collateral such as links within PDF documents.




Lecture evaluation: Lecture Review Form




The lecture review forms utilized in this effort (see Figure 1) have
the following questions: name, position, organization, e-mail address,
have you ever taught an introductory epidemiology course (yes or no),
rate the lecture on content, presentation, relevance, and overall
rating (the rating scale for these last four items: 5 = excellent, 4 =
above average, 3 = average, 2 = below average, 1 = poor). In May 2004,
Dr. Songer suggested that an “expectation” rating of the lecture may
provide many important insights into quality measurement for the
Supercourse. In August 2004, an additional question was added to all of
the Supercourse peer review forms: “How does the quality of the lecture
compare with your expectations about it?” (The rating scale for this
item also utilizes Likert scales: 5 = Well above what I expected, 4 =
Above what I expected, 3 = Same as expected, 2 = Somewhat below what I
expected, 1 = Well below what I expected.)




Figure
1: Lecture review form, Supercourse project






Results



Using Google analytics® from June 10th, 2009 to June 10th, 2010, there
were 257,403 unique visits to the main webpage of the Supercourse, with
448,939 page views. This means that on average, a visitor accessed 1.74
lectures. Table I demonstrates the number of visits to the Supercourse
webpage from 212 countries/territories; the visits were mainly from
United States of America, India, and United Kingdom. It is interesting
to point out that the Biostatistics Course by Nicolas Padilla, Lecture
#15 on Correlation, is the 5th most visited lecture in the Supercourse
as of October 2010.




Table I: Visits to Supercourse Webpage by Country/Territory


	Country	n	%
	United States	110,299	42.8
	India	14,875	5.8
	United Kingdom	13,595	5.3
	Canada	10,845
	4.2
	Australia	6,470	2.5
	Phillipines
	4,781	1.9
	Malaysia	3,937	1.5
	Pakistan	3,568	1.4
	Mexico	3,305	1.3
	Egypt	3,224	1.3
	Other	82,504	32.0
	Total	257,403	100.00




Table II presents the number of accesses of the Supercourse webpage by
countries and languages. It is important to point out that most popular
languages were English and Spanish. The number of visits is a very low
estimate of the usage of the Supercourse, as these numbers include
visits only to the main server in Pittsburgh. Due to technical
limitations, it is not possible to assess the number of visits to the
mirror server sites, the number of lectures downloaded in PowerPoint
format, and the number of lectures presented in front of classrooms.




Table II: Languages of Lectures from the Supercourse Webpage


	Language	Country	n	%

	English	United States of America	206,348	80.2
	Spanish	Latin American Countries	7,133	2.8
	English	Great Britain	6,602	2.6
	English	Other Countries	4,267	1.7
	Chinese	Taiwan	2,934	1.1
	Chinese	China	2,782	1.1
	French	France	2,610	1.0
	German	Germany	2,412	0.9
	Spanish	Spain	2,344	0.9
	Russian	Russia	2,207	0.9
	Other	Other	17,764	6.8
	Total		257,403	100.0




Lecture evaluations filled out in Spanish can be used as a surrogate
measure of interest of Spanish language speakers in certain areas.
Based on this assessment, it appears that the ten most interesting
topics to Latin American faculty members include: addictions, diabetes,
global warming, disasters and Just-in-Time lectures, statistics,
nursing, infectious diseases, epidemiology, public health, and cancer.
This appears to be somewhat similar to the interest of English language
faculty members, who are also interested in Just-in-Time lectures,
cancer, and statistics, while the difference between these groups is
that English speaking faculty members appeared to be less interested in
infectious disease. For the 3,233 evaluations we obtained, content had
a mean score of 4.82±0.61, relevance had a mean score of 4.84±0.55, and
presentation had a mean score of 4.78±0.69, with the overall average
rating being 4.87±0.47 and the expected quality average rating being
4.80±0.58. Clearly the lectures are most appreciated. The mean scores
for lectures translated into Spanish were at least 0.5 points higher
than scores for the main Supercourse lectures in English.




The Latin American Supercourse was divided into areas (see Table III)
to make searching easier. In three years, the Supercourse had almost
30,000 webpage accesses to the front page alone, and the Latin American
Supercourse database had faculty members from almost all Latin American
countries. Each month, members of the network received a newsletter
from the Latin American Supercourse with news about new lectures,
changes in the lecture of the week, or updates about new important
lectures, such as those for Influenza A (H1N1) or hurricanes.5,6
These
messages were regularly sent to over one thousand of e-mails contacts
from the Supercourse Latin American Network.



Table III: Areas of concentration for Latin American
Supercourse and
numbers of lectures available in these areas


	Area	Number
of Lectures by Year	Total


		2007-2008	2009	2010	


		O	T	O	T	O	T	O	T
	Addictions	6	9	2	0	1	0	9	9
	Cancer	0	11	0	1	0	0	0	12
	Global Warming	1	2	1	0	0	0	2	2
	Disasters	0	15	0	2	0	0	0	17
	Diabetes	2	3	0	0	0	0	2	3
	Cardiovascular Diseases	10	3	0	1	0	0	10	4
	Infectious Diseases	5	10	1	0	0	0	6	10
	Nursing	104	0	4	2	0	0	108	2
	Statistics	0	8	16	0	0	1	16	9
	Epidemiology	1	81	2	1	0	1	3	83
	Nutrition and Obesity	0	8	0	4	0	0	0	12
	Global Health	3	11	2	3	0	0	5	14
	Maternal and Childhood Health	5	62	0	0	5	0	10	62
	Public Health	9	15	2	0	0	0	11	15
	Supercourse,Internet, and Technology	11	27	0	1	0	2	11	30
	Just in Time	0	25	0	1	0	3	0	29
	Total	157	290	30	16	6	7	193	313




Conclusions



Large numbers of public health instructors, especially Spanish speaking
instructors, are using the Supercourse lectures as a source of
information from the world’s leaders in public health and medicine. The
efforts of the Supercourse and the Latin American Supercourse teams are
giving “fruit” in the form of better, up to date education for public
health professionals. The selection of translated lectures in the Latin
American Supercourse potentially represents gaps in the existing
materials available to Mexican faculty members, such as biostatistics,
infectious disease epidemiology, and just-in-time knowledge on
disasters.




The challenges involved in the development of the Latin American
Supercourse include identifying collaborators and identifying a
supporting mechanism for sustainable development of this effort.
Another big challenge is that many faculty members of the Latin
American based institutions do not have the websites of their schools
available on the Internet, and thus they are difficult to find for
initial contact. Additionally, many faculty in Latin American countries
do not speak English, making international collaboration hard to
initiate. As we mentioned in our introduction, similar challenges have
been found in Central Asia.




The parent Supercourse and the Supercourse translations into Spanish
are having a great impact on health professionals from Latin American
countries, demonstrated by the number of webpage accesses and page
views. Interest in the Spanish language Supercourse is also
demonstrated by evaluations, which are scored even higher than English
language Supercourse lectures. It is likely that the Latin American
Supercourse lectures are teaching more students about Global Health and
Prevention than any other lectures, especially in Latin American
countries. The Latin American Supercourse will also continue to work on
developing advanced quality control methodologies, building on the
existing publications in this area.7-11
Expansion of the Latin American
Supercourse is an important and much needed effort.




Since the situations in Latin America and Central Asia are similar, we
would argue that it would be important to develop more efforts into
getting the Supercourse translated into Russian and the other languages
utilized in Central Asia. The popularity and high ratings of the
translated lectures show that this information is desired but
unavailable to those who do not speak English. These translation
efforts would greatly improve the reach of public health information in
the region and globally.




References



1. The Supercourse faculty. Global cooperation in higher education:
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2. LaPorte R. Red de Salud Global [Spanish]. Supercourse 2007 January
8. Accessed 2010 June 4. http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/lecture/lec28191/index.htm




3. Supercourse on Epidemiology, Internet and Global Health 2010.
Accessed 2010 June 1. http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/~super1/index.htm




4. Latin American Supercourse on Epidemiology, Internet and Global
Health. Accessed 2010 June 4. http://www.feoc.ugto.mx/super/curso.php




5. Chotani R. Just-In-Time Lecture. Influenza pandemic A(H1N1)(Swine
flu). Latin American Supercourse; 2009 December. Accessed 2010 June 24.
http://www.feoc.ugto.mx/super/JIT/J0025/1.htm




6. Ardalan A, LaPorte R, Shubnikov E, Linkov F, Russel M, Noji E.
Hurricanes. Latin American Supercourse; 2008. Accessed 2010 June 24.
http://www.feoc.ugto.mx/super/JIT/J0006/1.htm




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