The Internet and globalization of public health education quality improvement by mirroring

The Internet has grown exponentially in the last five years. One of the ways to harness the benefits of the Internet in public health is to develop its web-based educational materials. One of the limitations of the Internet, which hampers the global sharing of the materials on the web, may be the slow downloading speed. This study, using the Supercourse as a model, examined the association between the evaluation of the content of the materials on the web and the perception of its downloading speed. The downloading time of home pages by accessing a local mirror site and by accessing a distant original site was compared.; The Supercourse is a web-based library of lectures for teachers at health-related schools around the world, providing an overview on public health, epidemiology, and the Internet. The association between the perception of the downloading speed of the lecture slides and the evaluation of the lecture content was examined using 401 responses for 37 lectures of the Supercourse, taking into account various possible confounders. The downloading time of a lecture home page was compared by accessing randomly selected samples of its 50 lecture home pages of the Supercourse at a local site as well as at distant sites.; The content scores of the lecture by the faculty members who perceived that the slide downloading speed was slow were significantly lower than by those who perceived that it was fast (3.51 versus 4.11 p < 0.01). The results were the same after taking into account various possible confounders. The mean downloading time from China, Peru, and Poland exceeded 15 seconds while it stood around six seconds for Germany, Norway, and the USA. The mean downloading time was significantly shorter by accessing the local sites than by accessing the distant sites.; To share educational materials on the web globally, one must evaluate not only the content of the lecture, but also how people at a local site access the Internet. Having a copy of the original educational materials is one of the most feasible and inexpensive ways to solve the delayed downloading time of the web materials.