 Hello global supply chainers and welcome to our first live event of SC0X. Thank you very much for joining us. I have today invited two of our very foremost people here. I have Dr Eva Ponzer with me. She's the executive director of our program and she graduated from University of Madrid and now is a research associate here with the Center of Transportation and Logistics focusing on on the channel distribution strategies. Together with Chris, she has been developing our program here for the past, is it five years now? Four years? We started in fall 2015 and since January 2016 to now. So it's three years now and she's running, I think it's the 20th We already run 21 courses and now we have five courses live. Pretty exciting times here. Pretty exciting times. Yeah, absolutely. So I've invited Eva to talk today to you about the MicroMessage Program in its entirety and the benefits you have from joining our five courses here. With us is also Brittany Collins and Brittany is originally from Pittsburgh, has a bachelor's degree in marketing and spent seven years in the steel industry, has a lot of work experience and then decided to also do our MicroMasters program. So she has a lot of insight knowledge about how it really feels to be on your side and we're hoping that she has a lot of tips for you of how to actually succeed in our program. So thank you very much, both of you for joining me today. My name is Alex Rotkopf. I'm the course lead for SC0X. I'm a research scientist at the Center of Transportation and Logistics, focusing mainly on humanitarian and global health problems. Let's get started with our work today. I've prepared a little agenda that I'm going to share with you in just a moment. Here we go. So my plan for today is introduce you to the big picture of the MicroMasters program, then do a deep dive in what you can expect from the course at hand supply chain analytics and how the course logistics works and into that we massage all the tips from Brittany and her experiences and knowledge. What you can do with us here is you can interact with us because we have set up Slido and the fact that you can actually hear us right now and see us is you've taken the first step because you have locked into Slido and you see that screen on the left hand side, the video, and on the right hand side you have the option to ask us questions. So any question that is burning that is important to you, just put it in there and don't forget to put in your name. We're going to only answer questions that have names on it. That's our policy here. And we are going to try to cover those in the next 60 minutes. What we also have is we can ask you questions. That's called the poll. And if you switch from the questions to the polls tab, you can answer. Right now I have one poll online, which is do you already have MOOC experience? And people are responding to that pretty well. You can see here we have about 30%. So it's pretty evenly distributed across the first three. We have a lot of people that don't have any MOOC experience. They're newbies, so we need to take care of them. Then we have about 24% of people that actually have done online courses already but never really completed an online course. So today is our day to convince you to perhaps convince SC0X as your first course. But then we have also very experienced learners already with 33%. Interesting, we also have 13% of people that already done a MITx supply chain course. So there must be people that have perhaps taken SC0X or SC4X. Maybe these are our CTAs, our community teaching assistants. That could be too. 12% out of 150 people watching. Some of them. That there are some. One question for you. So when you started with the first SC1X course, did you have any previous MOOC experience? I did not. So I first saw about the MicroMasters or actually not even the MicroMasters but the SC1X course on Facebook. So it's really important to be able to interact and learn about new opportunities through social media. And so I saw it advertised on Facebook and that was my first exposure to edX and to MITx. When did you start? SC1X in 2000? Yeah, 2016. So early 2016. And at that time SC0X, the course that you're taking now wasn't offered. So I started with SC1X but I can share with you later about SC0X because I did take that as well. Thank you. Yeah. Good. So my next point on the agenda is to learn about the MicroMaster program in its entirety. So let me quickly switch you to the video. So Eva, you're going to cover the big picture. Sure. Introduce us to our program, please. Definitely. Thank you so much, Alex. And welcome again to this live event for SC0X. So who are we? We are the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. And this is a center that started more than 40 years ago with the mission of creating supply chain innovation and driving it into practice. I wanted to highlight here that every single thing that we do in this center is totally industry oriented. It's very, very applied. So we have three main legs. The first one is research. And there are more than 15 full time researchers at the center, leaving different researchers, research lines. Chris Kabliss, Dr. Kabliss, he's leaving the freight lab. We have Mattia Wickenbaum, leaving the mega city logistic lab. Jarrod Gossel, leaving the humanitarian logistic lab. And many other researchers working in different areas of supply chain management. We also have Outreach. My colleague, Gene Rice, he's leaving the Outreach part of the center. This is all about our partners. Our partners are companies. These companies collaborate with us. They offer master thesis and capstone projects for our SEM, residential learners. They also collaborate with us in research projects. And again, research projects that are industry oriented and industry applied. And the third leg is education. So this MicroMasters program is part of the education leg at CTL. We started more than 20 years ago with the supply chain management master degree. This is the number one master degree in supply chain management in this field. This is running by Dr. Bruce Arson for the last 20 years. So it's a master degree program in the area with a very good reputation. Apple, Google, important companies are coming here to recruit our learners to work in these companies. We have been also running a PhD in logistics and also a bunch of different courses for executive education. More recently, in fall 2015, President Rave, Raphael Rave, TMIT announced the first MicroMasters program. And this is the program that you are now part of that. So let's go to the next slide. Here what I want to highlight is that the MicroMasters and those that just enrolled in SC0X, you are now part of a huge community of SCX learners. We have so far more than a quarter of a million, more than 270,000 learners that have been taking at least one SCX course. 17,000 of these learners are verified learners. We have two types of learners in our courses. We have audit people. These are learners that just enrolled for free in our program and verified learners. These are the learners that are pursuing for the certificate. And we will explain more about what it means to be a verified learner in a SCX course and in particular in SC0X. We have issued more than 26,000 certificates in total, 1,273 credentials. These are people that have completed the five courses plus the comprehensive final exam. So we have now a huge community of MicroMasters holders all around the world. And I need also to say here that this is a global program. We have learners from more than 190 countries and we are very proud of that. The most represented countries are still United States. The second country is India and the third one is Brazil. But the third position is always Mexico, Brazil, Canada. We have also a good representation of Europe. We have a good representation of learners from Germany, from Spain, from France. But the beauty things is that we have learners from all over the world. We have people from Nigeria, from Bangladesh, from Bora Bora, from the small island in the world. And this is something that definitely bring a lot of value to this program. So let's go to the next slide. Yes, in terms of the guiding principles, there are two guiding principles behind this program. And these are MIT and CTL principles. The first is to educate the world for free. Why all of our contents are available for free to anyone anywhere that enroll in any of our SCX courses. And the second principle here is to provide a credential at a reasonable amount of money. Indeed, the cost of the credential that is $200 per course is only covered the administrative costs associated to issue the certificate. That is not covering the actual cost of this program. So this is one of the principles, democratize the knowledge in supply chain management. In terms of the SCX courses and in particular, in terms of SC0X course, the course that you are now enrolled, we are working. Believe me that this team and the course lead, Alex in particular, our teaching assistant, Andrea, for this course and our amazing community of teaching assistant. All of them are going to work in order to provide the best learning experience to you through this course. We are also working in providing a rigorous assessment because of the certificates. So there is one part in the course that is learning just for collaboration, just to have fun and to learn as much as you can. And there is another component that is assessment. Since we are going to provide a certificate at the end of the course, we need to be sure that you have reached the basic knowledge in this course in particular. That's why you are going to be and you need to pass some graded assignment, meter and final exam through the course. And we are going to try to ensure the rigorous of this assessment. Switch to the slide deck again. Let's switch and let's talk a bit about the value of this program. The program includes five MOOCs, five massive open online courses. You are enrolled now in the very first one, supply chain analytics, SC0X. We encourage you to take the courses in sequence. However, we know that sometimes this was not possible. This is the example of Brittany. When she started, we only have one course. And it seems that we have some learners at least that already took part of our courses. Because we are 12% saying that they took MITx, MicroMasters. And we know this is happening because we are not enforcing that. It's not mandatory. However, it's recommended. We highly recommend to take in sequence. It also depends on the background of the student and many other things. But in any case, after SC0X, we are offering supply chain fundamentals, then supply chain design, supply chain dynamics and supply chain technology and system. Five SCX courses all about supply chain management. At the end of the five courses and only for those that took the course and completed the course as a verified learner and passed the five courses. These are the only one that can take the final comprehensive and proctor exam. And this is something that is mandatory in order to earn the MicroMaster Credential. The MicroMaster Credential by itself is a standalone certificate. And we learn that our learners, they are posting in the LinkedIn and they are using to apply for a job in supply chain management. And the credential is also a pathway for credits to apply for a master degree here at MIT or at any other university that is recognizing now the MicroMaster Credential as a pathway for credit. Let's go to the next slide. In terms of the big picture and the contents. The three first courses, SC0, 1 and 2, these three first courses are more about conceptual models. In SC0X, and Alex is going to give you a more deep journey in the contents of SC0X. You are going to learn the basic analytic tools in supply chain management. In supply chain fundamentals, we focus more on inventory management, demand forecasting and transportation management. And then we move into the network design. Just apply quantitative model in order to design a distribution network for just an example. The two last courses SC3X and SC4X are more qualitative courses. They are more close to the real life. We are adding here complexity. We are trying to bring expert for industry. And we are trying to bring this complexity for the day to day and real life problems. And in SC4X, we want you to learn about how to deal with big data, how to learn tools and techniques that help you to analyze this big data and how to organize and how to manage the information flow in a supply chain master. And then we are going to do the very end, the final uncomprehensive exam just to learn the credential. So these are the five courses that we are offering. So Brittany, you already completed the five courses plus the CFX. You already earned the micro master credential in May 2017. So how was your experience through the five courses? Because we know that there is a lot of effort behind that, a lot of hours, a lot of nights. So let us know a bit about your experience and also tell the audience about your main takeaways of these courses. Sure. So as Eva mentioned, I did the journey through all five courses and through the comprehensive final. I was a working full-time professional. So during my work day, I was not able to spend any time towards the courses. I was really working on this in the nights and on the weekends. But what I found was that it was beneficial to me. It was worth that extra effort and that extra time because I was able to take some of that and apply it towards my job. So I think the courses that stood out the most to me were SC2X and SC4X. So I enjoyed all of them. I thought that there was value and what you really find through the journey is that supply chain has so many opportunities. So you really get exposed to different areas of the business. It's not just about transportation, right? There's procurement, there's data systems. So it was really important to me to be able to do the journey through the courses and be exposed to all of that. Yeah, we just received a flash, a flute warning alert. Sorry about the sound. We hope we are going to be safe here. Excellent, Brittany. Thank you so much for sharing your experience. Let me pick up some questions. I forgot totally about the questions because we were so much into our MicroMasters program already. There's one that is by Murali. We can just answer right away after the MicroMasters credential. Would MIT have an online master degree program in supply chain management in the future? So I think he's kind of looking towards what the path is again about MicroMasters and then doing something on campus. I'm going to, let's move to the, yes. So answering your question, the offer that we have now is a pure residential on campus. So after completing the MicroMasters credential, you can apply for a residential master degree, one full semester on campus. We are not offering so far an online master degree. So let's go, yeah. Perhaps one other question that comes in along with the certificate stuff is by Larry. I think that's important too because he asked how our MicroMasters credential compares to other cases like the MAPICS or CPIM or CSCPS. CSCPS. Yes, these professional certifications. Exactly. Yeah, this is a great question, Lauren. So the MicroMasters credential. So the name is MicroMasters because it's the first part of a master degree. So the contents you are going to find in the MicroMasters are equivalent to master's degree courses here at MIT. It's pure MIT content in terms of intensity, in terms of the content by itself, in terms of the number of great assignment practice problems you need to solve. So I would say it's very intense. It's equivalent to the level of education we are providing here at MIT at master degree level. That means that once you complete the MicroMasters is why you can apply to a full master's degree residential program. The professional certifications, these are great programs. I would say that these are more kind of specific, are very specific and very oriented to specific topics and specific questions for professionals. I know that they are great programs. Indeed, some of the people that already earned the AP certificate at CSCMP, they are joining the MicroMasters because they want to continue and pursue for a master's degree. So this is a pathway also to a master's degree. Okay, cool. Yeah. So in terms of the courses, as I mentioned, five courses, the cost per course if you are pursuing for the certificate is $200. However, if you just want to have access to the content by itself, you can enroll for free. You don't need to pay anything. To pay $200 is just to pursue for this certificate. In terms of effort, in terms of effort in each course, our learners reported that they are spending in between 8 to 12 hours per week of effort. In terms of the structure, each course includes eight weeks of content. You will need to pass one meter exam, one week we dedicated just to the meter exam, one week dedicated to the final exam. And we are providing two weeks off just before the meter to give you time to prepare for the meter exam and one week off before the final exam. So you will have time to prepare for this final exam. A total of 13 weeks because we include here the week zero. This is just the logistics, the week that most of you already did in this course and it's just informative. It's just to share with you the syllabus, how the course work, the owner code, and all of the rules around this course. Yeah, the total cost of the program is $1200 in order to complete the five courses plus the C effects. Let's move to the next one. In terms of the value proposition, so most of our learners, they reported that they are doing because they really want to promote and to have a career development. We also know that some companies, General Electric is an example, we have Expeditor, we have more companies that they are offering this to the employees. And this is a way to train their employees in supply chain management. So we have here, I'm happy when I, let's go to the next slide. When I learn from my learners that they got a job and they send a note to us and say, hey, finally I got a job, I passed the interview thanks to this program. So this is really something that we are very proud of that. Mia is an example, she got a job in Akamai recently. Will is from Australia and he moved from a different field to supply chain management and now he's managing a team of people working in supply chain management. The third path for the credential, let's go to the next one, is a pathway for credit. You complete the program, you earn the micro master credential and then you can apply to a master degree here at MIT. You can apply to the MIT residential program, the 10 month program. You can apply to the blended master degree, a five month program here at MIT one full semester. Or you can apply to a master degree in currently more than 18 different universities all around the world. We have universities in Australia, universities in Latin America, universities in the United States and universities in Europe that they are offering a master degree that recognizes the micro master credential as a pathway for this master degree. In the case of the blended here at MIT, we are a convoluting the micro master credential for a full semester here. 42 credits, a unit of credits, this credential is equivalent to that. So students only need to spend one full semester here on campus. So it's a cool pathway if you want to study at MIT. Essentially it prepares you for all courses here on campus, right? Yeah, this prepares to you, however you need to apply and you need to be selected. So only 40 people are admitted per year. So it's very competitive. So I have two learners asking about that specifically. So one Jim is asking if it is actually a substitute for the GRE to apply for the admission. Yes, Jim, this is an excellent question. So you need to go, if you earned the credential and you apply for the blended master degree, you need to go exactly to the same admission process with one main difference. That is exactly the one that you point. You do not need to provide any GRE or GMAT because we are going to look into your micro master scores in each of the five SCX courses plus the CFX. So for the blended program, we do know us for any GRE or GMAT. We are just looking into your performance through the micro master program. I guess for our learners it's also perhaps important to know how the weight is. So I don't know, you probably won't want to say a number, put a number on that. But how much weight do you post on how they performed in the micro masters when you select them for the program here? Okay, so this is one part of the selection process. I mentioned the rest of the thing that the committee is looking into are exactly the same as the traditional residential program. That means we are looking into a video that we asked you to prepare to understand your motivation and to see your skills to present in public. We are also looking into, you need to prepare a custom project proposal. You need also to provide letters of recommendation. So you need to go through the whole selection process and every single thing counts. I would say that definitely performance is one of the things that we are looking into that and we are considering as part of the selection process. But it's not the only thing we are considering. So you have to have that whole bouquet of different components in mind and it's not like we focus on something specifically, right? Definitely, definitely. So Brittany is an example of a learning she completed the micro master convention and now she just started into the MIT supply chain management residential program, the 10 month program. So tell us about your journey. Why did you decide to join this program and why did you apply? Sure. So it's a dream to be at MIT, first of all. It was definitely an attraction to me when I was doing the online courses to know that I was challenging myself to the level of the education that MIT can provide. And then to be able to take the accomplishments that I did online and convert that into being here in person was an amazing experience. So I elected to apply to the residential program because of kind of my years of experience in the industry and my interest in pivoting careers. So the residential and the blended both have extreme benefits. It's just as you consider that later on in your journey, you can decide if you are looking for the 10 month offering with a little bit more career support or if you are just looking to accelerate your career, perhaps within your same industry. Yeah, this is a great explanation. Definitely. Thank you. Yeah. Moving on, we've covered a lot about our MicroMasters program in its entirety and how it's set up and what the benefits are and how it may even go further to a master's degree at MIT. And now I want to move to our course at hand at C0X because I promise that we are going to talk about that a little bit. And they are enrolling at C0X. So we should cover that. You should absolutely cover that. Let's take a closer look at where we are right now. So currently we have more than 13,000 learners enrolled. So my number is a little off because I did the slide that yesterday. We have more than 760 verified learners already. So the numbers are growing very good. Our medium learner age is 30 where 60% is between 26 and 40 years old, which means that I guess we have a lot of professional people in our course. That we have a lot of experience, which makes me hope that we have great discussions in the forums too. If those learners get active, we will have really interesting components and discussions in our forum. That's a good thing to see. I need to say that every single sign that they go through the forums, I really learned something new because we have such a great group of amazing group of learners. That makes you always think, right? So there is always a new perspective and you think, oh, wow, I haven't thought about it this way or that way because you have all these kinds of learners that come from different backgrounds with different countries that have different approaches to problems or that face different problems. So that's pretty interesting to look at that. We have 88% that have a college degree or higher. So that's probably to be expected because it's not an advanced degree, but you need to have some prior knowledge to work through our course and have interest in that typically. Though I would say anybody with a high school diploma can succeed in our course, right? I saw one question that looked at, I'm a high school graduate. Can I take that course? Definitely. If you're interested, there is no hurdle for you doing that. If your math background in the high school was reasonable, I wouldn't worry about it. Yeah. In May 2017, when we did the in-person comprehensive final exam, two twins, they were high schoolers and they came. And I asked for the passport and they told me my mom is at the door with the passport and said, what? How old are you? I'm a high schooler and said, great. And they passed with a very good score. So this is possible and we have two high schoolers that already completed that. So no worries if you don't have an advanced degree, that's not a prerequisite here. Mostly it's interest in commitment. As Eva mentioned, it's a reflection of the entire work with 168 countries currently enrolled or people from 160 countries enrolled in our ST0X course. Usually the U.S. is leading. Currently it's 25%. India is second in line with about 13%. Again, Brazil is the third place. Canada is the third place. But they are always going back and forth. Your home country is represented with 1.7%. Thank you for bringing that. Thank you. I always appreciate that. My home country is hard on 24%, 2.4%. But I think if we would take the entire Europe as a comparison, we would be better. That's the number of population. 25% of our enrolled students are women, at least those that reported. And this is something that we really want to encourage more females taking this program. This is something that is happening in general in MOOCs, in particular in SEM. But step by step. We need more encouragement, more learners like Brittany. That's right. Moving on, I wanted to take one poll across the topics that we are going to offer in ST0X. We already see some responses. While I talk through, take your time, answer what topics you are looking forward to. I'm just curious what's interesting to you. Our course is essentially set up into two parts. We have the first four content weeks, which will be prescriptive modeling. After the midterm, we have a second set of four weeks of content, which will be predictive and descriptive modeling. You have already entered week one. All of you have already checked out, hopefully some of the videos that Chris recorded for basic functions in Algebra. That part is really simply just to get you set up, make sure that you have your Algebra correctly, get you warmed up also to how our course and our system works with putting in the numbers, putting in equations and stuff. That's not that exciting, I guess, for most of you, but we wanted to make sure that everybody has the same starting point, let's say. Then in week two, which we are going to release tomorrow, we are going to start with unconstrained optimization and afterwards also take a peek already into constraint optimization. Those two topics are very dear to us because we think they are at the core of how you understand better supply chains and how you come to good supply chain management decisions. Unconstrained optimization, one application for that is inventory management. If you want to understand how inventory management works, how an enterprise resource planning tool actually comes up with a number of how much you should order or how much inventory you should hold, you need to understand unconstrained optimization because it tells you how to minimize or maximize something. We are just doing a bare introduction to get you set up. You don't need to do it later on in SC1x. We are going to cover inventory management and you are not going to minimize costs or maximize profit all the time, but you need to have that intuition of two things or more things that are working against each other. There is always a trade-off. That is kind of the story of unconstrained optimization. We want to make sure that you have that in mind. I know that for many of you that is a pain. I don't know how you felt about it when you did it. The first half of the course was actually a little easier for me. It is the second half. We need to say this depends a lot on the math background that you have. For those learners that have a strong math background, these weeks are easier. For those that the math background is not as strong, then maybe you need to spend a little bit more effort during this first part. But in any case, the material is preparing to help you to go through that even if you have not a strong math background. Absolutely. We have set it up so that anybody with a high school degree can succeed in that process. You just need to invest maybe a little more time to work through the practice problems. So unconstrained optimization, keep in mind that this is just for you to be prepared to understand inventory management. That is I think the best story there is for unconstrained optimization. Constrained optimization is looking at if you have limitations on resources. So you want to maximize profit or minimize cost of say a distribution network and you have constrained carriers, you have constrained inventory. That's where you need constraint optimization. So any problem that relates to production planning that relates to network design, it's all essentially a constraint optimization problem. And we're going to cover that in detail in SC2X and here we are just setting you up to understand that better. That's why we also have Week 3, which is integer and mixed integer programming and network models, which is just the natural evolution of constrained optimization. You need to have that 01 option to open or close a certain warehouse or use or not use a certain carrier. That's where integer and mixed integer programming comes in. Let's say that we are going to focus more here on the math and how to set the model and then in SC2X they have more applications and real problems in order to apply these techniques. But we are offering real problems here too, right? But it's more about giving you a toolkit. The way I think about that is you're getting a toolkit to succeed in supply chain management and that toolkit will be with you through all our courses and hopefully through your career either on campus like Brittany or later on in your professional life. And all of the courses are industry oriented, industry applied. This is our approach for every single team we are going here at CDL. I think that's one of the biggest benefits to this program is that I didn't have a strong math background but with the stories and the way the problems are set up, it feels real to you that it's an industry problem and you can kind of make connections to what you're doing at your job. Exactly. So the last part of that first chunk of prescriptive modeling is algorithms and approximations because you know that better than anybody. In practice, it is oftentimes hard to get data, hard to solve problems and that's why you need to have a way to approximate things. That's what we are covering here and how to set up algorithms because you sometimes need to develop a step-by-step recipe to solve something essentially to make a computer solve something for you and that's why you need the algorithms and we just want to make sure that you have a good understanding and a good idea of how you can do that. That's why we spent a whole week on that too. After that in the second chunk of our course, we are going to move to predictive and descriptive modeling. So essentially it's kind of moving from a deterministic world that we have assumed before into a stochastic world. And we start first with distributions and probability because that's also something that most of you know very well. The world is not certain, right? We oftentimes don't know exactly what is going to happen. We don't know how demand will come to us. We don't know if our service time is going to be always set the same or if it fluctuates. If our supplier is going to deliver always at the same time or if it fluctuates, right? That's where uncertainty comes in and where we need probability distributions and we're going to cover in detail in week 7 distributions and probability theory just to set you up because that's kind of the core to anything that will follow in all the courses. You need to understand how distributions work. Afterwards in week 8 we are going to do statistical testing and I know that not so many people like that. A big fan of that. But it is a really valuable tool to understand if something changes. So if you're changing your production in some way and you have an average from before and now you're collecting sample data on how, for example, service time change, you need a tool to check if you have actually changed something or not. That's the essence of statistical testing. Myself, I'm using that quite a bit. Though I'm a modeler, I have to figure out if my probability distributions that I'm assuming are actually following a certain pattern. So I use a statistical test to just check if the data that I collected follows a certain distribution or not. That's where you need hypothesis testing. It's not a big secret but it takes some time and effort to get into it and I know that is a hurdle for some. Regression, also important to understand relations between independent and dependent variables. And my go-to case here is always freight rates because I think that the most intuitive way to think about it for us supply chain management people is I want to understand why I pay certain levels of freight rates. It fluctuates somehow and I don't know how it's influenced. So it may be influenced by distance. It may be influenced by full truckload or not full truckload. It may be influenced by refrigerated or not refrigerated. I can do that with simple linear regression. Find out how certain independent variables load on the dependent variable. And that's why we need regression to understand that better. We're doing just the pure basics in terms of linear regression. Nothing fancy, nothing too complicated here. And lastly, we have to think about simulation models because as the world gets more complex, as we have more uncertainty, it may just be necessary to simulate things because we cannot solve it for the optimum anymore. So we just build a simulation and put in numbers that we assume that we would set to learn how the system performs. That's not optimization, that's simulation. And we're going to cover quite a bit of that, especially because in that last section in week 10 we are going to do queuing theory and discrete events because if you're doing service management, if you're doing certain detailed production planning problems, you need to be able to model on a unit by unit basis and that's where queuing and discrete event comes in. And most of our practical work is going to apply simulation, so you need to be set up for that. And in real problems, real projects, what we are doing is combining several of these tools. So at the very beginning we start trying to build a model, an optimization model, which is a simplification of the reality, but at least we are going to try to understand the main state of and find the optimal solution. Once we have that and we want to add more reality and complexity to the problem, we need to move to this stochastic technique. We need to add these simulation techniques in order to add this reality to these problems. So we are combining in the real problems some of these techniques. Yeah, there's always a combination, right? We are kind of cutting them apart to teach them, but essentially to solve them you need to combine them. An interesting picture that we have here from our poll. I'm surprised, constant optimization is very high with almost 50% of the care of interest here. Simulation is always, because I know you guys, you know that the real world is complicated, so you need to simulate stuff and you're of course interested in simulating things. And unfortunately, despite my pitch hypothesis testing is not so famous. Yeah, but for any research project or any testing you want to do, you will end in using that, but I agree. My favorites are also the other ones. We all struggle with that, right? Yes, we know. Let me do some quick course scheduling and then I will check if we have interesting questions to cover. So the course schedule is, we started already on September 4th, with week zero, we are currently in week one, releasing week two tomorrow, course ends in 5th of December, so you're all free after that, but the next three months is spending time with us. Enrollment deadline is September 26th, so that's next week, right? The coming Wednesday. This Wednesday, no, the next Wednesday. So if you have any people that you think they should enroll, please let them know. That's the last week they can do and join us. And verification deadline is one week after that. So if you want to become a verified student, you need to do that until October 3rd. Just to highlight, we have these four content weeks, have one week, one off week, to prepare for the midterm exam, and the midterm exam will open on October 17th. We open for seven days, so due date is October 24th. And then we have, again, four content weeks, then we have one week off to prepare for the final exam. And after that, we open the final exam on November 28th, which will be, again, open for seven days. Yeah, one minor comment here. The midterm final is open for one week, but once you decide to open the exam, this is going to be a timed exam. This means that once you start the exam, you only have four hours in order to complete the midterm or four hours to complete the final exam. Right. Eva, you want to cover a little bit about how you're becoming a verified student? Yes. So as we mentioned, enrollment is open. Anyone with any interest in supply chain management can still enroll for free. If you want to pursue for a certificate, the only way to do that is to become a verified student. So to become a verified student means that first, you need to upgrade your status. And to upgrade your status, you need to go on the right side of the main page of the course and click on upgrade and pay for the $200. The second step is to verify your identity. So let's go to the next slide because we have more details here. So once you click on upgrade, you pay the $200. There are two ways credit card or PayPal. Once you complete that, I highly encourage you to go through the second step. Go through the ID verification process. You need a webcam, you need an ID card with your picture and your name need to be exactly the same name that you have included in edX platform. And we need to verify your identity. If you have any issue during the ID verification process or during the payment process, please contact directly with edXsupport.info.edx.org because all of the verification process relies completely on edX. Yeah, this is all. It's a simple process, but definitely the deadline is important. We cannot extend the deadlines. And in terms of the benefits of being a verified learner, as I mentioned, the certifications. So if you have a clear idea that, yes, I want to have a certificate in SC0X or I'm considering to go through the MicroMaster Credential Program, you need to become a verified learner. This is the only way to earn the certificate. This is the only way to pursue for the MicroMaster Credential. In addition to that, we are providing extra services. We are providing life events for verified people. This first life event is open to anyone that is enrolling the course. However, the second and the third life event is only for verified learners. We are also providing supplemental material. These are not core material, but are like more advanced cases or master pieces that are connected to the topics and show you applications of the techniques that we are explaining in SC0X. Sometimes in SC4X, in SC3X, we are adding interviews with experts, industry experts, because we want to be in this reality. So this supplemental material, we are like going deeper into the contents. Also, I learned that most of our verified learners, they are very active in our SCX community. They are also most of them part of the MicroMaster portal. I'm taking advantage of this SCX Global Network of Learners. So these are some of the benefits that we have observed for verified learners. Let's move to the next one, Alex. Yeah. Now we are also offering group enrolling. This is what we call program enrolling. This means that if you now, you have a clear idea that you want to pursue for the MicroMaster credential and complete the five courses plus the CFX, you can pay in advance for the whole program. And in this case, you are going to take a 10% discount. So instead of paying $1,200 for the whole program, you are going to pay $1,200 minus $120, the 10% discount. Yeah. And you can do this program enrollment. Also for companies, there is an option to do for companies, organizations, they can do batch enrollment. This means that if they are considering to send 10 employees or more, they come by a batch enrollment for these 10 or more employees. One example is General Electric. They recently sent 50 employees to pursue the whole program. And they buy these 50 coupons and distribute them on their employees. So it's also an option that companies can pay for this program and do this batch enrollment. So batch enrollment for organizations and companies go to the next one. Program enrollment to anyone, any learner that wanted to pursue for the credential can do this program enrollment. The only thing is that this means that you need to pay in advance and you are going to have this 10% of discount. You must be enrolled within 24 months. This means that we expect that you complete the whole program in 24 months. Typically I need to tell you that most of our learning completed in 18 months or less. So, yeah. And then you receive the coupon code and you go through the process. So one question that our learners have that comes up is can I also do everything in audit and then at the end if I like the program I just sign up for the CFX, pay the whole amount and do the CFX. This is a great question, but the answer is no. This is not possible. You need to decide if you want to become a verified learner or not before the verification deadline per course, per run. And you need to be a verified learner in this specific run before week four in order to pursue and earn a certificate in this specific run of the course. So you need to make the decision in the case of SC0X before October 3rd. Okay. So I cannot just jump in at any point. I need to follow the course. You need to follow the course because then you are going to have also this additional benefit that I mentioned, life events, supplemental material, and certificate is only for verified learners. First, you can elaborate a little bit on that supplemental material because I think our learners need to understand what that actually means. Sure. Two questions of whether that is really helpful, if that amends the contents, if that is really necessary to understand it. So what's that benefit? Maybe Brittany can also jump in here and tell her take on that. So in terms of the graded assignment, final exam and midterm, I would say that you do not need this supplemental material. The core material for graded assignment midterm final are delivered through the videos. So you need to watch the videos. I really recommend you to solve the quick questions and the practice problems. And with that, this is what we consider the core material of the course. You will be ready to pass a complete graded assignment midterm and final exam. Having said that, we are providing this supplemental material. This is additional material. That definitely, in some cases are going to help you to understand better or to better understand real problems, real cases. We are providing as a example of supplemental material. Sometimes we are providing additional practice problem. But as I mentioned are additional. We are not going to prepare a specific graded assignment based on supplemental material. Sometimes it's just a master thesis or a custom project that one of our SEM residential students have completed and illustrate an example of how to apply one of more than one of the techniques that we are explaining in SC0x in a real project with a company. Sometimes it's an interview with an expert and we are asking the expert about the future. How are you applying these techniques? How is your day-to-day? How these techniques can help you to better manage your supply chain management, these kind of things. So I would say things that are really, are very interesting, but additional things. So it's a ask. Do you have any conditions? Yeah, I think it enriches your experience. It's more than just trying to get the grades and get through the course. It's more about actually growing as a supply chain professional and so that's what the supplemental materials offer. Awesome, cool. So we're running out of time. I just want to make sure that we cover at least how our platform is set up. Before we do that I'm releasing one poll to get an idea of how much time you want to spend on the course and later on then see how Brittany perceives feedback. Let me just quickly go to my slide here. There we go. So do you want to cover that? This is very quickly in all of our SCX courses we differentiate two spaces. Learning space where we provide the videos, the quick questions and the practice problem and we really encourage collaboration. We encourage you to go through the discussion forum and ask as many questions that you have related to that. Create the study groups and collaborate with your peers. Assessment this includes graded assignment homework, weekly homework assignments meter and final exam. This is an individual work. That's why we do not allow any collaboration in the assessment space. That's why we do not allow you to post any comment any question related to a graded assignment meter or final exam question in the discussion forum through the platform or through any other means. So you have the email account SCX help at MIT.EDO and you can ask those specific questions that you have related assessment and Andrea and Alex and the whole team will be here trying to help you but no post or collaboration in assessment. So what does that mean for WhatsApp groups and these things? How do we think about that? So definitely if you want to share a new about SCM, if you want to share a comment related to the video, some concept that you are struggling with, we are totally fine to have a study group and help each other to learn more. We know that collaboration is a great source of learning and we really encourage that. The only thing we do not, we want to clarify is that the assessment is an individual work and I need to assess every learner, each individual their knowledge. So this is the only thing that you cannot collaborate at all is regarding assessment regarding the other thing. Yes, very welcome to collaborate. That makes sense. So looking at my poll, students have responded. So leading is 30 hours a week, they want to spend almost a third. Another third almost says well, it's probably be something like 9 to 10 hours and the rest says 6 hours or less or 11 to 12 or even 13 or more hours. So Brittany, what's your take on that distribution? Yeah, I think that 7 to 8 hours is realistic as an average but there are certainly weeks that take longer or if you're exposed to a brand new software and you want to learn it and kind of play with the new software, there's a lot of opportunities to be exposed to like SAS or AMPL, Ample, do you call it? Yeah, so those are times when if you dive into exposure to a new software, you may be spending more time and then of course just depending on how easy something is to you or how familiar it is to you, you may be putting in more hours if some things unfamiliar. So then you would also say then probably that across the course across the eight content weeks and the preparation, your time will fluctuate, right? So some weeks will be more easy to you because you have been exposed to that before because you're a more deterministic person or more stochastic person. So it may also fluctuate, right? Is that what you Yeah, that's true and just try to paste yourself. So if you are a working professional like I was, I tried to break up doing the lesson one videos and then take a break, do the lesson two videos and I typically was working on like the graded assignment over the weekends, but if you paste yourself that way you'll be less likely to burn out. So that makes sense. So it's possible. There's a lot of favor behind but if you organize well if you allocate certain time every single week to do that, I think is something that absolutely might help. So we're almost out of time. Perhaps we can just quickly show the students to of our really cool components that we have in our course, right? Because the students I guess they know that we have videos as that's the core content that Chris presents. We have the practice problems and the quick questions to train the problems, right? So I think that that's the preparation for the graded assignment. I think that's something that our students have already taken up on, but maybe we talk about Sandbox quickly. Sure. These are interactive problems. This has been developed by the MicroMaster team Connor Makowski, our digital learning fellow. He has developed these cool tools that is a way for you to interact with the problem. This is for instance a linear programming model and you can play with the value of the objective function change that and see the effect on the problem or change or modify the constraint, change the value and see how this is going to affect the solution of the problem. So it's just a way for you to apply the concept that we have reviewed in the videos and play with them and try to just have fun, play and fix and understand better understand this concept. So it's kind of an additional help for you, but you just try it out and if you do a practice problem maybe you can put in some numbers here to check if what you're doing, how the graphical representation of that is, get more intuition into that. And I just wanted to add any feedback that you have related to any of our problems, Sandbox, whatever, share with us. We are really, really open to receive your feedback. Indeed, this is the fourth time, fifth time. We are running a C0X and believe me that this run is much better than the previous one and the previous better than the previous one because of the feedback that we are receiving. We take it very seriously and we really are very open to improve our courses based on your feedback. So do not hesitate to share this with us. And yeah, be active. Be active in the discussion forum. It's a great space. It's a resource that you have there and you have a lot of professionals from all over the world that can help you in the amazing group of our community teaching assistant. They are super helpful and more than that also peers, your peers, your colleagues. This is a great source of knowledge too. So whenever you stumble across a problem and you don't really get how it's meant, how you could solve it go first into the forum and check if there are threats there because you have a good chance that other learners have stumbled across the problem too and you can just read up on that before you spend hours and hours and hours of time to solve a problem by yourself. Just check what the community has developed already. So that's a really important and helpful resource that some of our students just forget about and we just wanted to highlight that quickly here. We are out of time so much stuff to talk about and we have so many questions. I see that the community has started answering their questions for each other. We have a couple of CTAs, Active Pram, Lance, Chris I've seen I think that are answering questions. Ramon was also online so you read up on that too. Let me jump to the life events just highlighting that we are going to have two more life events that are dedicated only for the verified students. One deep dive that is going to be happening on October 16th covering a linear programming problem probably that I did with a colleague here at CTL. It's a pretty exciting project. I'm looking forward to that presentation and I've invited Chris Kaplis your instructor for November 27 to do problems for practice. So any problem that you come across during the course and I wanted to ask Brittany that but we're just out of time here. Any problem that you come across that you think can I solve that with linear programming or can I do a hypothesis test or throw that on us in the problems for practice and we're trying to at least give you an idea of how we would approach it with the toolkit that we've provided at that point in the last eight weeks. That's the idea here. Open the pool of the time slot for the life event. Should I just ask that quickly? Yes. I'm just asking you quickly what is a good time for a life event. So we have been working on the assumption that 1500 or 1400 UTC is a good time for you guys. Let's see what the community out there thinks and maybe we can include that in future settings. As always we will try our best but as you know we have learners from all of the time zones. So it's really hard to find the optimal time for everyone. Let's close that with MOOC community and you will have something to say about that. This is something that I'm fascinated about this program because in a very spontaneous way it's happening and it's happening that students from many different cities they are having meet-up groups study groups, people from Germany, from Peru, from Chicago from Hong Kong and it's great. We are very happy. I also need to say thank you to Grau, he's our community manager and he's really behind creating this community of SCX learners. So I think that at this point this is one of the big things that you can get from this program, being part of this community of SCX learners. So just to show that this is happening take advantage of that. Yeah, so thank you so much. Awesome. Thank you guys for joining. I've seen almost 200 viewers at the same time being with us today so it's a pretty good reception here already. Thank you very much Eva for taking the time to explain all of the program that you have built up to us. I think it's very valuable for students that just joined our courses to understand how it works actually in what kind of paths there are. Brittany, thank you very much for joining us and giving us some insights. I think our learners have so many more questions for you. I saw that directly questions were posted probably you have a chance to sign up to SCX and just give them some feedback on the forums if that's okay with you maybe. Guys, thank you very much. I'm looking forward just reach out to me as your course lead or our TA Andrea who is mainly doing the emails or our CTAs. We are all here just to help you make the most of that learning experience. Welcome to the course again and we are looking forward to the next 12 weeks. Thank you so much. Bye guys. Thank you.