More than 3,200 people, from professors and professionals to college students and the just-curious, have signed up to learn more about the first in a series of SFI massive open online courses (MOOCs) in complexity, scheduled to begin in late January.
The first course, “Introduction to Complexity,” will be an accessible introduction to the eld, with no pre-requisites or course fees. It begins January 28.
SFI External Professor Melanie Mitchell, the course’s instructor, says she’s heard from many people about the need for an online course in the science of complexity. “There’s an increasing number of people, people from all over the world who can’t come to one of our events, asking where they can learn about this stuff,” she says. “We knew there was going to be a lot of interest.”
MOOCs are offered by academic institutions in everything from fiction writing to physics, and their numbers are growing, along with the demand for nontraditional education choices. Online courses won’t soon replace on-campus courses, Mitchell says, but they do offer certain advantages. “People can go at their own pace, they can focus on topics they’re interested in, they can take it in any order they want,” she says.
A MOOC can accommodate a large number of students, so a single instructor - often a top academic in a field – can teach the course to thousands, and often tens of thousands, of students at once.
In the 11-week “Introduction to Complexity” course, participants will learn about the tools used by complex systems scientists to understand, and sometimes control, complex systems. Topics include dynamics, chaos, fractals, information theory, self-organization, agent-based modeling, and networks.
“Students also will get a sense of how these topics t together to help explain how complexity arises and evolves in nature, society, and technology,” Mitchell says.
SFI’s MOOCs will be integrated with the Complexity Explorer, an online education repository that includes computer simulations, background reading, exercises, and other resources. (Development of the Complexity Explorer is being supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.)
As part of the course, an online student forum will be available to participants, “so people can discuss contents of the course with people from all over the world,” Mitchell says. Her team will help organize local meetups in some areas, similar to study groups. “Introduction to Complexity” will be repeated, possibly in Fall 2013. A follow-on “Introduction to Complexity, Part 2” is planned for Summer 2013. Mitchell also hopes to offer a series of more advanced, special-topic future courses related to complex systems.
Mitchell is an SFI External Professor, a professor of computer science at Portland State University, and author of the award-winning book Complexity: A Guided Tour.
For more information, visit www.santafe. edu/mooc.