- 11 May 2017
Course Updates
Have you been waiting to jump into a session of Agent-based Modeling guided by Bill Rand? Wait no longer! Enrollment is open for the course, which starts June 5th. With this course you'll gain a deeper understanding of how and when to use agent-based models, and you'll get a chance to build your own model of whichever system intrigues you the most. Get feedback from Dr. Rand during his weekly office hours, or from other students in the forums, and get your work reviewed by your peers when you finish - a fantastic opportunity for some hands-on learning. The first unit is free and open to all; to continue through the rest of the course a tuition payment of $50 is requested. There will be 100 scholarships made available, and for every 2 people who pay a tuition after the first 100 pay, we will release 1 more scholarship.
We asked Dr. Rand a bit about what he learned from his first ever MOOC-instructor experience and what he plans on changing for this second iteration of his course. Read about it here.
As this is the only the second time the course will be given, and we rely on volunteers to create subtitles, the majority of the course will not have subtitles (yet). However, if you're enthusiastic about this course and want to help non-native English speakers to better understand the videos, we could use your help! As a bonus, if you complete 120 minutes of subtitling, you'll get a scholarship to this session of Intro to Agent-based Modeling (or a t-shirt, if you prefer!). Our new volunteer mrmrjones is working through the course from start to finish to add English captions in, give them a hand!
Introduction to Complexity has been open for a month now, and there are over 2,300 students enrolled. This year, we opened all of the units at once, so you can truly work through the course at your own pace up until the session ends at the end of June. There's plenty of time still to get started and finish by the end date, so encourage your friends and colleagues to give it a try.
Complexity Economics enthusiasts, we are postponing the course until 2018. There's a good reason - Professor Doyne Farmer is working to finish a book by September and won't be able to start putting his MOOC together until October. We will be ready to assist him as soon as he has the time to focus on the course. In the meantime, we ask you to be patient a little while longer. There are two other courses we have yet to announce that we will begin developing later in 2017. More on those as the year progresses! Hector Zenil and Narsis Kiani's course on Information Dynamics and Complex Networks is on track for a (northern hemisphere) Fall release.
More tutorials are on the way - Justin Grana has been filming his part II of his Game Theory series. Dynamic Games will be coming your way in the next month or two. Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellow Vanessa Ferdinand has agreed to create a tutorial on basic probability and statistics, which we will be working on in June and July.
Barbara Oakley visit
We invited Barbara Oakley, Professor of Systems Engineering at Oakland University and Ramón y Cajal Distinguised Scholar of Digital Learning at McMaster University, to come to the Santa Fe Institute and give a couple of seminars on lessons from her MOOCs, Learning How to Learn and Mindshift, as well as MOOC-making lessons in general. Read a little bit more about the visit and watch an interview with her here. Focus on two subtitle stars
Our subtitle volunteers put in hours of work to help caption and translate our course videos and we think they're simply amazing, not just for their subtitling work but also their professional and personal interests. Our top subtitler, Marina Muscan, is also an accomplished painter who sent us a lovely quartet of canvases now adorning the SFI education walls. Cigdem Yalcin will be teaching a course this Fall at Istanbul University on Chaotic Systems, inspired by many of our online courses. Read up on these two volunteers and how the subtitle project is going here. Join the team today, earn some rewards and tons of good karma: https://www.complexityexplorer.org/explore/volunteer-to-subtitle-videos. We especially need help with The Introduction to Agent-based Modeling course, the Introduction to Fractals and Scaling course, as well as all of our tutorials. Have you benefited from the subtitles created by the volunteers? We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email or comment on this post and tell us what having subtitles means to you.
Announcing the SFI Networks and Big Data Short Course
Are you a professional, faculty, student or other individual eager to explore and apply ideas from complexity to your own area? The Santa Fe Institute's Short Courses offer you a chance to receive an intensive introduction (in person) to the field of complexity as it relates to Networks and Big Data. Through lectures, exercises, and interactive discussions with prominent SFI faculty and your fellow participants, you will learn how methods and tools at the forefront of complexity science are being applied to modeling, predicting, and impacting the behavior of systems across many disciplines. Find out more about this course here. Dates: July 26 - July 28. Location: New York.Fundraising for 2018 program costs
We have now raised $6,993 of our $30,000 goal for donations in 2017. Thanks all!
