Multilayer and multimetric quality control: the Supercourse.

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.