University Times

The Pittsburgh Computing Center (PSC) has redesigned Pitt’s Supercourse, a web-based repository of lectures by scientists and educators worldwide. Produced at Pitt’s World Health Organization Collaborating Center, Supercourse provides information on how to practice preventive medicine to more than 56,000 scientists in 174 countries.

Supercourse developers felt it was underused and needed a facelift from the text-oriented format established in 1986 that has been unchanged since then.

Shandra Williams, PSC multimedia designer, said, “Our task was to create a template and navigation that displays the hoard of resources consistently, loads quickly and can be seen from a Third-World country on Netscape 3 using dial-up.”

The PSC team updated the entire collection of 5,100 lectures manually with assistance from Supercourse staff. They also designed and implemented an administrative interface with a two-step process for Supercourse staff to update the site in the future. The effort took more than a year.