Welcome to Supercourse

Supercourse is a repository of lectures on global health and prevention designed to improve the teaching of prevention. Supercourse has a network of over 56000 scientists in 174 countries who are sharing for free a library of 4875 lectures in 31 languages. The Supercourse has been produced at the WHO Collaborating Center University of Pittsburgh, with core developers Ronald LaPorte, Ph.D., Faina Linkov, Ph.D., Mita Lovalekar, M.D., Ph.D., and Eugene Shubnikov M.D. Please contact us at super1@pitt.edu .

Supercourse does not grant degrees or certificates, but is designed to be a resource for teachers, professors, and other educators. Supercourse does not provide access to faculty members developing the modules.

We were originally funded three times by NASA, and by the National Library of Medicine. We have built a “Library of Lectures” with passionate scientific lectures from across the world. We have developed a technology for inexpensive, sustainable global training. Our program consists of:

  1. Open Source: A Global faculty is developing and sharing their best, most passionate lectures in the area of Prevention and the Internet using an open source model. This benefits all. The experienced faculty member can beef up their lectures that are not cutting edge. New instructors reduce preparation time and have better lectures. Faculty in developing countries have access to current prevention information for the first time
  2. Statistical Quality Assurance: We have established a Deming Model of statistical quality control to monitor lectures over time.
  3. "Support" for Educators: The Library of Lectures consists of exciting lectures by academic prevention experts in the field. The classroom teacher “takes” them out for free like a library book. We"coach" the teacher rather than directly teaching students from a distance.
  4. Text books: British Medical Association put text books on line for us.
  5. Multilingual Lectures: For global use, the first lecture is in 8 languages. We are experimenting with machine translation as well. We have lectures in 31 languages.
  6. Faculty: 70 Nobel Prize winners, the US Surgeon General, 39 IOM members, 200 AES members, 55 NAS members and other top people contributed lectures.
  7. JIT lectures: Within days after a disaster lectures are provided, e.g. the Bam Earthquake, Tsunami, H1N1, Haiti Earthquake.
  8. Mirrored Servers and CDs: We have many mirrored servers in Egypt, Sudan, China, Mongolia and others. We have distributed 20,000 Supercourse CDs.
We have published over 147 papers in leading medical journals including Nature, Lancet, British Medical Journal, Military Medicine, Nature Medicine, and PNAS among others. Our web pages have been identified as in the top 100 by PC Magazine, and one of the top 11 content pages by the Lancet. We receive 75 million hits a year.

Please contact Ron Laporte, Director, WHO Collaborating Center, and Professor of Epidemiology, Uni. Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15261, USA