- 27 Jun 2016
Course Updates
Your patience is paying off - our courses are starting up again, including our brand new Introduction to Agent-based Modeling with Bill Rand! We will have a course starting every month for four months.
In July, we start with Dave Feldman's fantastic Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos, now open for enrollment. If you haven't had the pleasure of taking on of Dave's courses, then you're missing out. In the words of one Complexity Explorer student, I must say that if Prof Feldman decided to give a course about the California Sewage system I would definitely enroll.
Bill Rand kicks off August with the long-awaited Agent-based Modeling course. See his video introduction to the course and enroll today! In September Liz Bradley takes us deeper into Nonlinear Dynamics, and Melanie Mitchell will be running the universally loved Introduction to Complexity in October. There are a few other courses in production that have been delayed until early 2017, and many more being planned.
In the world of tutorials, we apologize for recent delays in getting the Introduction to Computation Theory, Optimization Theory and Renormalization Theory tutorials to you. Rest assured we are doing what we can to finish these and will let you know as soon as they are available.
Funding Change
Complexity Explorer has been supported by a grant to the Santa Fe Institute from the John Templeton Foundation. This funding is nearing its end, and in order to continue supporting our online education program, we will be changing how a few things run on the site. Until now all of our courses have been completely open and free. To offer you these courses, maintain the website, add new functionality, and create new courses and tutorials, we need to raise a quarter of a million dollars a year. The Santa Fe Institute is committed to bringing complexity education to the world through the Complexity Explorer, but grant funding and donations alone cannot sustain us indefinitely. We have a number of different funding avenues we are pursuing, one of which will be modeled with our Introduction to Agent-based modeling course. You may have noticed a lock on the course logo. This lock is an indicator that the course session will be a paid session.
When our Agent-based modeling course starts on August 1st, the first unit will be open and free. However, to continue through the course, take the tests, interact on the forum and with the course team, and receive a certificate of completion, we are requesting a minimum tuition of $50. Once the course closes, all of the videos and quizzes will be freely available in the Archived courses section of our site. So, you can still learn for free if you cannot afford the tuition fee - you'll just have to wait a couple of months. If earning a certificate and going through the course with other students and the course team on hand for questions is important to you, but you cannot afford the tuition fee, we have a limited number of scholarships available to waive the fee. You can read about these in more detail in the course FAQ.News - Q & A with Bill Rand
Bill Rand came to the Santa Fe Institute recently to film the introduction video for his course on Agent-based modeling. While he was here we sat down with him and asked him a few questions about the course and his research. See what he had to say here.
Subtitles
Attention subtitle volunteers and students of Dave Feldman's course on Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos! The course is starting up again on July 5th and there are still many of the course videos without English and Spanish subtitles, our two most requested subtitle languages. If you are already a member of our subtitle team, please come back and donate a little of your time to helping to subtitle the course videos. If you haven't subtitled us before and loved Dave's course, please consider joining our team! When you reach 120 minutes of subtitled video, we will send you a Complexity Explorer t-shirt or tote bag to you, anywhere in the world. Find out how to join the team here.
