Two new offerings – a course on fractals and a tutorial on random walks – are the first of a wave of new Complexity Explorer content slated to come online over the next year.
The new course, Fractals and Scaling, was College of the Atlantic Professor David Feld- man’s response to requests for a broad exploration of the subject. It launched this fall.
The new tutorial, Random Walks by SFI Professor Sid Redner, offers a taste of random walks for students with more advanced skills. It is available now.
Gabrielle Beans, SFI Program Manager for Online Education, says new tutorials designed by SFI Omidyar Fellows Eric Libby and Joshua Grochow will be introduced later this fall, as well as an Introduction to Information Theory tutorial by SFI Science Board member and External Professor Seth Lloyd (MIT). “He’s an eloquent speaker, and his tutorial is bound to be a real highlight,” says Beans.
Unlike other popular online education platforms, like EdX and Coursera, which offer a diversity of stand-alone online courses, SFI’s online learning platform focuses exclusively on complex systems topics, providing both broad overviews of the field and detailed explorations of specific topics, along with news and interviews with instructors. “We want to create a network of information and resources that anyone can follow as deeply as they want,” says Beans.
When courses are active, students can interact with one another and professors. Archived courses do not allow the interactive component of the course but are available any time, as are existing tutorials.
Best of all, Beans says, all of Complexity Explorer’s content is free. More at complexityexplorer.org.