The Supercourse

A wealth of information from variable resources, including lectures and presentations that are searchable and downloadable too, are now available through the Supercourse (http://www.bibalex.org/supercourse).

What is the Supercourse?
The concept of the Supercourse, and its lecture style, is building a "metaschool" of a variety of themes that can train students through the Internet. The Supercourse is a global repository of lectures targeting educators across the world. It has a network of over 55,000 scientists in 175 countries who are sharing for free a library of over 3,400 lectures. By building a strong network of participating institutions and individuals, the target is to increase the collection to 100,000 lectures within one year and to one million lectures in a three-year time frame.

How is the Supercourse formed?
Lectures are selected, published on the Internet, and shared among scientists and teachers for personal use. A pilot project has been initiated featuring public health where 1000 of the "best" electronic lectures in epidemiology were published on CD and on the web.

Achievements
BA maintains a mirror site of the Supercourse (http://www.bibalex.org/supercourse), consequently ensuring high availability and reliability. The website is receiving over 500,000 hits per month. In April 2008, a new updated DVD was released during the BioVision Conference with 3,400 lectures. A new highly developed search facility is currently available to replace the Google search used at the moment in the original website. This facility provides morphological search for the HTML lectures' comments and the PowerPoint lectures' original data such that the search results are organized and grouped together. Search results are directly linked to the PowerPoint slide which matches the search keyword. Besides, frequent updates of searched data upon content modifications is also added.

The new Science Supercourse

As successful as the Supercourse has been, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina along with its partners from Pittsburgh University, focused on extending the scope of Supercourse, thus creating the new Science Supercourse http://ssc.bibalex.org . The new scope currently covers four major fields of science; Public Health, Computer Engineering, Environment and Agriculture. The new Science Supercourse offers a variety of more advanced functionalities reinforced by effective dissemination tools, convenient user access and an efficient retrieval system.
Read more on Science Supercourse.

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