Class Central, a site that collects information and reviews on thousands of online courses from around the world, recently ranked SFI’s “Introduction to Complexity” online course highest among 626 other online science courses.
Since it was first offered in early 2013, the 16-week massive open online course (MOOC) has been offered five times, with another session under way as of October 3. All told, some 27,000 people have enrolled in the course, taught by SFI External Professor Melanie Mitchell, with an average 13.1 percent completion rate – significantly higher than the world MOOC average.
Mitchell has updated the course with new interviews with SFI External Professors Doyne Farmer and Simon DeDeo and SFI Professors Jennifer Dunne and Sam Bowles.
Participants in the introductory course learn about dynamics, chaos, fractals, information theory, self-organization, agent-based modeling, and networks. There are no prerequisites and you don’t need a science or math background. Participants have included graduate students in the sciences and social sciences to retirees and high school students from 100 nations.
To join the current sessions, visit intro.complexityexplorer.org.
Two other SFI MOOCs – Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos, and Fractals and Scaling, both taught by College of the Atlantic Professor David Feldman – are first and second in Class Central’s math category of 224 courses listed.