Globalization of Science Education: A Scientific Supercourse

Ronald LaPorte (1), Gilbert Omenn (2), Ismail Serageldin  (2), Vint Cerf (3),  Faina Linkov (5)

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” Nelson Mandela

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Over 2000 years ago Socrates developed the foundation for modern higher education. The power of the Socratic Method and classroom learning cannot be denied. Classroom training has beaten back many worthy adversaries. The printing press did not defeat classroom learning instead, it partnered with it. Correspondence courses could not replace classroom learning. Edison mistakenly predicted that motion pictures would take over education. In the 1960s early morning college classes on TV fell by the wayside. Dot-comers had the classroom in their cross-hairs but missed.

Even now after 20 centuries the classroom has a 95% market share on college education. The classroom may be the most important and longest-lived Information Technology.

Why has the classroom survived and flourished? The reason is that it works. Classroom learning is one the most successful forms of teaching.  Non-interactive distance learning is not as effective. Distance learning is often expensive especially for developing countries (1). Teaching epidemiology is different in a Navajo Reservation, than in Stanford, or Baghdad, distance learning tends to be one-size-fits-all. Most of us remember an inspirational classroom teacher that changed our lives. Few of us have had our future changed by a “professor in a box”. We professors are sources of inspiration and love of science; we can model curiosity and teach hands-on experiments and the power of observation, critical to understanding and applying the scientific method. In contrast, distance learning often focuses on certifying large numbers of persons. Distance learning has a role to reach those in remote areas or with long or varied work schedules, but we believe it cannot overtake the classroom with regard to its volume taught, inspiration, quality of education and cost. The classroom may not be the best for teaching science, but there is none better. Empowering the local teacher is likely to be a wiser option for improving teaching than distance learning. We strongly believe in the power of faculty, we can help them. 

"Wisdom begins in wonder." Socrates 

There is a symbiotic relationship between research and teaching with the circulation of knowledge between the scientist who generates knowledge and the teachers who disseminate it. This circle of knowledge benefits all.  In higher education, bright students learn from experts to become fledgling scientists and researchers are challenged by young minds. University faculty have twin duties of research and teaching. Recently this relationship has become frayed. In developed countries new scientific knowledge may not appear in classrooms for 5 years. Also, it is  difficult to teach overview courses that have thirty different topics as few scientists can stay current in 5 areas, let alone 30. In addition, preparing lectures requires considerable effort to wade through journals, and books in a different field to construct multidisciplinary lectures; thus we remain in our silos.

We can learn, and potentially partner with  K-12 math and science education programs, the curricular developments and benchmarks from Project 2061 (2) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the grade level standards for knowledge from the National Academy of Sciences are helping. There are programs being developed to help K-12 teachers, but few programs to help teach at the University level. These can help guide us as to what works and does not work. Various authors raised concerns about the quality of teaching in postsecondary educational institutions (3) which we can help address. We believe it is feasible to assist educators in higher education globally by providing template  lectures from experts accompanied by a guide for their use and explanatory annotations for the teacher. The local teacher needs to adapt the lecture, of course, but preparation time is reduced from 15 hours to 2 hours. Quality is increased, compared to starting from scratch, and seasoned teachers can sprinkle courses with timely new insight from different disciplines.

"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for." Socrates 

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For beginning teachers, there is even more need. Remember teaching your first time? You stood in front of a class, stressed and sweating, with 83 pages of notes. Why do we require new teachers in epidemiology, psychology, biology, etc. to create lectures from scratch when thousands of other lectures have been developed, many by world's experts? A new teacher should have access to template lectures from scholars who have gone before them. We have access to their articles and books. Why not their lectures? Template lectures aid faculty by enhancing the repertoire of good lectures and materials. As we argued in Nature Medicine (4), cooperation and lecture sharing reduce redundancy, and produce better training.

Many scientists in developing countries have not seen a current journal in 10 years, making good scientific lecturing impossible. The regional benefits of lecture-sharing and network-building interactions could lead to a new scientific sharing across countries and  ethnic groups. For example, bringing scientists in Arab countries closer to scientists world wide (8).

As said by Cech and Kennedy in Science (6), "We need to revitalize training and teaching" of science world wide. We need to use new approaches for teaching in the area of public health and other disciplines. Approaches have to be effective, sustainable, affordable, and fresh to transform scientific global training. 

Our underlying strategy to improve global training is simple. We need to network all scientists who want to share materials. Without good current materials, training has to be poor. Once excellent lectures become available to the classroom teachers we can build other technologies.  

We were originally funded by NASA, and then the National Library of Medicine. We built the largest academic network in Global Health. We extracted from the network an open source "Library of Lectures" with high quality scientific PowerPoint presentations. These are shared for free.  PowerPoint is almost universally available and has been demonstrated to be an excellent medium for F to F (faculty to faculty) sharing of content (7-8). However, our system could use any other lecture presentation system.

The Supercourse consists of:

1. Network building: We use viral marketing and other Internet approaches to establish the largest global academic network in prevention.
2. Open Source:  Global faculty share their best PowerPoint lectures on public health, epidemiology, and prevention of injuries and disease.
3. Teaching Faculty:  Six Nobel Prize winners, IOM members and other prominent individuals contributed lectures. Almost half are from outside the U.S.
4. Mirrored Servers and CDs:  We have 45 mirrored servers in Egypt, Sudan, China, Mongolia, and other countries. We distributed 20,000 Supercourse CDs with 1038 lectures to cross the digital divide. The CDs are a gift that is meant to be given in that we ask those who received them to distribute copies to 5 students.
5. Teaching a Million: The best teachers should produce the best lectures to teach 1000s if not millions. We tested this with several lectures which likely will teach a million students.  
6. Just-in-Time Lectures: We collaboratively created sets of scholarly lectures real-time within days after the Tsunami, Kristina, and Avian Flu. We "drilled" these into the classrooms of the world, reaching 120 countries.
7. Quality Control: We have been exploring scientifically based quality control from other disciplines as there is very limited scientific investigation on Web QC. 

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Recognition of Progress:  We have published 170 papers in Nature, Lancet, BMJ, Nature Medicine, PNAS, and many other. Our web pages have been identified as in the top 100 by PC Magazine. Supercourse websites receive 75 million hits a year. We are the largest suppliers of lectures on Global Health in the world.  

Our goal is to provide the best possible template lectures over the Internet using an Open Source system to enhance the teaching, research, and practice of public health globally. Feedback is overwhelmingly favorable. This resource helps improves teaching with less struggle. Scientists help scientists directly, using the medium of shared lectures. We already see enormous success with 1000s of instructors using the Supercourse already as an aid to teaching and research.

 Call for a Scientific Supercourse:

The prevention Supercourse is proof of concept that scientists of one field, would network together to share their best lectures. This benefits all of us, the rich, the poor, the young researcher, and experienced scientists. We have been highly successful in improving training, research and collaboration in our discipline, with tens of thousands of academic faculty and the largest collection of scholarly scientific presentations on prevention in existence. Can we expand this approach to all of science and have a million faculty and 300,000 lectures helping each other? We could start to melt our scientific silos. Epidemiologists could teach students about the chemistry of water pollution, chemists could teach about the design of products, and researchers in the Gobi desert could teach their students about the formation of snowflakes. In the process we can reduce the scientific divide between the haves and have not countries. We can also reduce the delay during which scientific information comes into the classroom from 7 years to 7 minutes. We can reinforce research initiatives underlying, as examples, the U.N. Millenium Goals and the development of nanotechnology (9). We scientists are born to share our networks, and to train new generations. A Supercourse of science provides a new, more efficient research knowledge supply chain to allow this to occur.

We have just begun to recognize the advantages of a rapid populating of PowerPoint lectures on the Internet. Two-three years ago there were 5 million PowerPoint lectures on the web, now there are 25 million. Finding high quality lectures on the Internet is a chaotic, unstructured process. There needs to be categorizing, evaluating, retrieving, and guiding users, together with quality control and open source dissemination of these lectures to improve teaching and research. It is time to establish a system to use this valuable resource to help us all.

We would use exactly the same approach as with our Supercourse. The first step would be to network scientists world-wide who want to share lectures. The second would be to encourage these scientists to extract and share their best PowerPoint lectures. We have found that scientists are very generous with their lectures. In fact, the response is most gratifying. The AAAS, other scientific organizations and scientific journals could greatly facilitate this effort.  

"There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance." Socrates 

With a Scientific Supercourse we can revitalize the teaching of science and empower future generations of scientists and citizens throughout the world.

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Bibliography

1. Sherry, L. (1996). Issues in Distance Learning. International Journal of Educational Telecommunications, 1 (4), 337-365

2. AAAS-Project 2061 http://www.project2061.org/ accessed February 1, 2006

3. Jacobs, J. (1989, August/September). Training the workforce of the future. Technology Review, pp. 66-72.

4. Supercourse Faculty.  Global Cooperation in Higher Education.  Nature Medicine, 2000, 6, 358

5. Parker R. Absolute PowerPoint. New Yorker 20 May 2001;76-87.

6. Cech T, Kennedy, D. Doing more for Kate:  Science, 2006, 310:17

7. LaPorte, RE, Linkov F, Villasenor T, Sauer, F, Gamboa C, Lovalekar, M, Sekikawa, A, Sa, ER.  Papyrus to PowerPoint (P 2 P) metamorphosis of scientific communication.  Brit Med J  2002;325:1478-1481

8. Husseini A., Saad R, LaPorte RE  Health Supercourse to end Arab Isolation.  Nature 2002 4127;778.

9. Hassan MHA.  Small things and big changes in the developing world.  Science 2005;309:65-66.

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