Multilayer and Multimetric Quality Control: The Supercourse

Abstract

Cancer-related presentations are rapidly communicated through thousands of Websites, chat rooms, newsgroups, list servers, newsletters, YouTube, and e-mails, with no specific attention to the validity of the reported findings. Quality control (QC) of cancer education lectures on the Web is an important concern, just like the quality assessment of all information found on the Web. This paper discusses the Supercourse, a global library of 3,600 online lectures available at www.pitt.edu/~super1 and several alternative quality control approaches that are being developed as part of this global effort. Peer review may not be optimal for the review of online lectures because it is labor-intensive and has low throughput. To our knowledge, we are among the first to begin a multilayer and multimetric evaluation approach toward QC (MQC) of PowerPoint lectures on the Web. We hope that future scientific research on peer review as well as on emerging multilayer QC methodologies will help us to determine best measures of QC, especially in the field of rapidly developing cancer education.

Developing a Supercourse Help Desk for India

“…The Supercourse is an Open Source lecture library developed at the University of Pittsburgh Web server, and all Supercourse lectures are available without charge to any one. 5 , 6 The Supercourse team has developed the Indian Supercourse Network as a part of the main Supercourse. 7 The Indian Supercourse Network is a collection of lectures in epidemiology, public health and community medicine, on topics of particular interest to teachers and students in India.…”