 Hello, everyone. Good morning, and welcome to the first live event of a C1X supply chain fundamentals. I'm here at the CTL, the Center of Transportation and Logistics at MIT with Dr. Eva Ponce. Hi, Eva. Hi, Ima. Thank you for inviting me. Thank you for coming. Eva is the executive director of the MITX MicroMasters in Supply Chain Management. We're very happy to have her here today. And I am Ima Lorella. I'm a Postdoctoral Associate here at CTL, and I'm the course lead of C1X and also at C0X. So welcome. We are glad you joined us. And I would like to go briefly through the agenda. We will follow today. First of all, we will share with you an overview of the program with MicroMasters, the big picture, we call it. Then we will deep dive into C1X, just an overview of the content and the structure of the course and the key dates. After that, we will have the opportunities to discuss with your peers, with your fellow learners in the breakout rooms. Through our topic, we will propose to you. And after that, Eva and I will give you some tips based on other learners' experience with our SCX courses on how to successfully complete the course and get your certificate. So let's begin with the MicroMasters overview. Perfect. Excellent. Thank you, Ima. So at this point, I think that you might know that you are part of a huge community of SCX learners. We have so far more than 233,000 learners enrolled in at least one SCX courses. 15,000 of these learners are verified. There are two ways to take the SCX courses. One is audit. This is free. The contents are open to anyone, anywhere. And the other way is the verified track. The verified track means that you need to pay the fee for the certificate. And also, if you pass the course, you will earn a certificate in one of our SCX courses. So far, we have issued more than 22,000 certificates. These are from students from all across the world. There are more than 196 countries represented in the MicroMaster program. Last May, 2017, we had the first comprehensive final exam. And we complete the first cohort of MicroMasters. 622 learners earned the MicroMaster Provincial last May, 2017. And this February, in 2018, in one month, exactly from now, we are going to have the second CFX. So we are going to generate the second MicroMaster cohort. So the MicroMaster program includes five SCX courses. Most of you already passed and complete supply chain analytics, SC0X. After that, we are offering these course, supply chain fundamentals. In supply chain fundamentals, we mainly cover inventory management, demand forecasting, and also transportation management. Then we move to supply chain design. And here, we mainly cover the three main flows that we have in a supply chain, the materials flow, the information flow, and the monetary flow. In supply chain dynamics, we try to bring more reality and more complexity. So we cover more real-life problems. And we add complexity to the supply chain. We cover here supply chain dynamics techniques and also global supply chain. In supply chain technology and system, the fifth course, we mainly focus on data analytics, big data, some of the machine learning tools, and also the ERP system and the new technology and trends that are impacting and implementing in the current supply chains. And finally, the comprehensive final exam. And this is because of the MicroMaster. At the end, we need to be sure that you have the knowledge and the basic knowledge in supply chain. That's why we have this Procter and Comprehensive final exam at the end, before granting the MicroMaster in supply chain management, this standalone certificate that is also a way, a path to earn credits and to have access to an MIT master degree or a master degree in other universities like Zaragoza or some universities in Australia like Queensland, Carkin University, Rochester Institute of Technology, and other universities across the world. Maybe we could share with them that we just welcome our first course of blended students from the MicroMasters. That's right. Friday, so we're really excited about it. Yeah, we were very excited. And I need to tell you that the students were so motivated, so energetic, very excited to be here at MIT. We received 40 students for the MIT MicroMaster blended program, sorry, and 17 students for the blended program at Zaragoza. So this was a huge event. Yeah, thanks for bringing this, Ima. So the big picture, as I mentioned, we encourage you to take the five courses in order. That means it started with supply chain analytics, moved to supply chain fundamentals, then supply chain design, and finally, the two more qualitative courses that are supply chain dynamics and supply chain systems and technology. The three first courses are more quantitative, and we cover here the basic analytics tool that you are going to use in all of our courses. And these courses, SC3X and SC4X, are, as I mentioned, more qualitative. We add more complexity and reality to these last courses of the program. In terms of the value proposition, so we have different learners, learners, as I mentioned, from all over the world. And the question is that we have people that are taking the MicroMaster because they want to have the individual professional career development. We also have companies that are sending their staff to these courses in order to train them in supply chain management. There are some people that are taking this MicroMaster because they want to have this pathway to a master degree here at MIT or at any other university that recognize the MicroMaster as a path of credit for the master degree program. So these are the three value propositions. As I mentioned before, the MicroMaster by itself is a standalone certificate that most of our students post this in the LinkedIn web page. And they use to apply for a job in order to demonstrate that they have this knowledge in supply chain management. And some of our students are using to have access in a university. Let's have a look at the supply chain fundamentals by itself. That is the course that you are currently in. So S1X, as Seba mentioned, is the second course of our MicroMaster's path. And it's a fantastic course. It's a really fun one. We cover a lot of interesting topics and very important topics for supply chain management. This is the second course of the path. That means if you have completed SC0x, that's highly recommended to complete the SC0x before doing SC1x. If you haven't, it's fine, but just make sure that you review the basic concepts that are needed. For example, statistical distributions, those are very important. So just refresh your knowledge about this. And we always provide the key concept documents. So you also have the key concept document in SC1x for the previous course. So just in case you didn't take SC0x, we highly recommend you to go through the key concept document. Exactly. And if you did SC0x, you will be happy to apply what you learned in SC1x to more realistic problems. So we will mainly cover, and I've already mentioned it, demand forecasting during the first three weeks. We'll introduce the topic of forecasting, what is a good quality forecast, which are the metrics to assess that. We also introduce the technique of time series analysis that is widely used for forecasting. And cost analysis, mainly using regression, ordinary least squares regression. And we also cover some special cases in forecasting. After that, we will introduce inventory management. And this is like the biggest part of the course. Four weeks are dedicated to inventory management. First, we begin with deterministic demand. Assuming deterministic demand, we wish they will happen all the time. That is not the real thing. No, the real thing. It's not the reality. But the economic order quantity model is a really useful model for determining inventory policies, creating inventory policies. And after that, as we'll know about this, we will introduce stochastic demand that is much more realistic. We will talk about single period inventory models and also multi-period inventory models in weeks seven and eight. And finally, week nine, we'll introduce some special cases in inventory management. And also, we'll introduce warehousing, some basic concepts about warehousing and how to manage warehouses. And finally, in the last week of the course, we will learn about transportation management, the fundamentals of freight transportation, and how transportation management links to inventory management, how it impacts inventory management and also the costs for our company. So in S1X, we will mainly analyze the trade-offs between costs and service level. So just keep this in mind that we will always be trying to figure out what's the trade-off between the costs and the service level and what's the ideal point where we will stand for each problem. So this is an overview of the course contents. And just telling you, it will be really exciting, also challenging sometimes. But you will learn a lot if you dedicate enough time. So this is how these are the numbers we have right now in our course. So this is your class. And your class has 19,000 learners right now. 729 of them are verified learners. We will go a little bit more into that in the next slide, what means being verified and why we recommend it. The median-learned age is 30 years old. But we have the learners' age range between 15 until 72 for this class. So it's a very wide range of age. 85% of you have a college degree or a higher degree, master's or doctorate. That's quite a lot of education here. And 181 countries are represented with the top three countries by number of students being USA, India, and Brazil. But there are people from many more places. So yes, I would like to highlight some important dates for our course. So the course started on December 27. That was the week zero. And we are in week two now. No, we open week two tomorrow. So week one is already open. And I hope you've gone through it already. And the course ends the 28th of March. Another two important days to keep in mind is enrollment deadline that is in January and 17th. So if you have some colleague who is interested in joining, just encourage them to join before next Wednesday because enrollment will close. And these are hard deadlines. We cannot extend these deadlines. Exactly. And this is a great opportunity, it's just like. Let them know. It's still open. And the verification deadline is January 24th. So one week and a half from now, right? Not two weeks from now. Two weeks from now. The midterm exam, and this is important, just plan in advance for this because these are also hardwired in the system. The midterm exam opens on February the 7th and closes on February the 14th. As you know, it will be a timed exam. So you will have four hours to complete it once you start, but you can plan like when to take the exam like during all this week. And the final exam will open on March 21st and close on March 28th. So same thing for hours, timed exam, just plan in advance when will you be taking this exam. Regarding the verification, why do we encourage you to get verified? Well, verified students get access to more materials in the course. There are some supplemental materials that are only accessible for verified. These are more practice problems, some extracurricitations, some interesting documents or lectures. Massive thesis from the MIT students from the previous cohorts. And that will round up your learning experience. So that's one reason. The second reason is for all our learners. But from now on, the other two life events we will have will be exclusive for verified learners. And we will have experts from different fields coming here and sharing their knowledge with you. So that is really, really interesting. Eva will explain a little bit more about the life events in a little bit. And the third and one of the most important ones is that you will only get a certificate if you get verified. So if you want to demonstrate the world that you passed these courses, you should be verified to get an official certificate. And this certificate will also allow you to complete the MicroMasters if you're interested and just get your credential at the end of the MicroMasters path. So in order to get verified, you just have this, you can see in the screen, you will see that when you log into the course, you just click on that and you can upgrade to verification status. You will have to pay $200. That's the price for the verification for each of our courses and also for the final exam. And it's a really, really easy process. And would you like to... Ah, yeah. And then we do first need to go in and pay these $200. And then the second step is to ID verified. So we need to make sure that you are, you say you are. So you need to get ID verified in the platform with a picture of yourself to make sure that you are our learner. And you need also to show an ID government card that shows your picture and your name in the same card. So this is... And if you have any issue with the verification process, you need to contact directly to edX support because the verification process relies on edX, the whole process. So we really encourage you to do that because of the reasons that Ima explained is an easy process, but it's important that you complete the two steps. Not only the fee, also the ID verification. Both are part of the same thing. And you need to complete both in order to earn the certificate with us. Let's move now to the SCX learning experience and how we deliver the contents and some tips about how the course work. So the first thing I want to mention here is that we have two different environments in our SCX courses, in particular in SC1X. The first one is the learning environment. In the learning environment, you will find videos, you will find quick questions and practice problems. And we really encourage you to collaborate on that. We really encourage you to have study groups, to go through the forums, to post your questions. If you don't understand some concept, go there and try to collaborate with your peers, which is great and is an important part of the learning experience too. So we really encourage collaboration here. We really encourage you to go to the forum, to debate, to discuss, to all of these things. We really believe that this enhance the teaching and the learning experience for you. In addition to this environment, we also have the assessment environment. In this case, every single week, you will find the great assignments. So these great assignments are open during two weeks and during these two weeks, you need to before the deadline. And again, the deadline are hard-working in the system. We cannot extend this deadline because this is a massive course. We need to follow this schedule. Unfortunately, it's the only way to keep this under control. So we cannot extend this deadline. So you have this weekly great assignment. And then you will also have a midterm and a final exam. This is individual work. We need to individually evaluate and assess your knowledge, not the knowledge of the team or the study group. So in this case, we do not allow collaboration. We do not allow you to pose any question related to great assignment or midterm or final exam questions in the forum. For this purpose, we have the email account. We have S-E-1-X help at MIT.edu. That is the help desk account that we have with our teaching assistant in all of the team. Sorry, we are monitoring this email account and we give answers to this email account, but we do not allow to do that through the forum. So we are trying just to offer you an accurate and reliable assessment, a rigorous assessment. And this is because of the MicroMaster, because of the certificate, because at the end you are going to receive a certificate that says, hey, I passed, I successfully passed the course because I have the knowledge. And we need to verify that. That's the reason we are doing that. In terms of how we deliver the contents, those that already took S-E-0-X knows perfectly. Our instructor, Chris Kapliz, behind the lightboard, we use the lightboard for the introduction of the weeks. And it's a great tool just to connect different concepts and explain you what we are going to cover in each week. In the videos, we always provide transcripts. You can speed or double speed the videos if you want to do that or pause or go forward or whatever you decide to do. We also provide different kinds of problems. We have a bunch of voice over PPT. We use a lot of slides, explain these slides. We also add pictures and these kinds of things. In S-E-1-X, you will find also some of the interactive problems. We call them sandbox. These are problems that allows you to play with the problem. For instance, the first part, you have an optimization problem. So you can change the values of the objective function and see the effect of that in the result of the problem. Or you can play with the constraint and relax or make it even more harder to the constraint and see the effect of this on the problem. So these are just problems to help you to understand the concept playing with the different parameters or the inputs that we have in this problem. Also for the normal distribution, different problems that we include. This is something recent that our digital learner here at MIT is part of our team. He's developing this nice tool that allows you to play or interact a little bit more with our problems. Another thing is the instantaneous feedback. This is something that you will find with the quick questions, with the practice problem. So you can include your answer and see if this is correct or incorrect. Also you will find an explanation after three attempts. So you will find if you didn't get the right solution, you will have an explanation of how to get that. We are also trying to build community. Arthur Grau, he's our community manager. He's behind the camera today. He's doing a great job also trying to connect with you and try to create this SCX community that for us is really, really important. Once you are part of a course in SC1X, we really encourage you to participate in the forum. The first week, we encourage you to introduce yourself to tell us where you are from and what are your goals with this course. And after week one, you can see that the discussion from the start to be very much professional and you will find specific questions for a specific problem, great questions. Most of them are really, really very good questions. I really like to go through the forum and see how the peers, you are helping other learners to understand the concept. The staff is also there, MIT staff and also the great community of a teaching assistant that we have. They are volunteers, they are learners that already took the course, they are high performer and they are helping us to moderate this forum. So they are also doing a great job. They are also the bridge in between the learners and the staff and bringing all of the issues that you encounter with the platform. So the forum, we really encourage you to go there and to share your feedback, your comments and also any question that you have related to the concepts. Yeah, you will recognize our community teaching assistants that are also MIT staff because there's only a tag next to our names when we post something. Yeah, the life event. So this is one of the things we are planning to offer three life events during this course. The next two life events are only for verified students as Ima mentioned before. The idea here is that you can interact with the staff, with the instructor. Sometimes we choose a case study to discuss a complex problem or a problem that some of the learners bring to us and they have a current problem in their company related to the concept that we covered in the course and we are very happy to discuss this kind of problem, real problems with you through these life events. So these life events also allow you to connect with your peers because you have the breakout rooms and this is an opportunity to see and be seen by your peers and to discuss the specific case or questions that we propose in this virtual meeting with your peers. So. Could explain them like what we've planned for S1X? Yes, so in S1X, the second life event will happen in week five, we call this the deep dive. So here we are going to go through in depth in some of the concept that you have reviewed during the first four week of the course. And the third life event is where Ima will send a note to you asking for this problem from practice and we will have Dr. Chris Kapliz to discuss this problem with you. Yes. So we just planned the second life event like to bring an expert and discuss some case study or article with you and then the third one just more focus on a practice problem. So we will be really willing to send us these problems from practice, these problems you encounter in your day to day work, share it with us and then we can choose some of them and try to solve them together. It will be fun. Excellent. As always, we are very open to receive your feedback. So any feedback that you have, do not hesitate to send a note to the SE1x help email or send a note personally note to me. We are happy to receive your feedback. Based on this feedback, we are always improving our courses. So we are very happy to receive that. So I think this is all from our side in terms of the presentation. Let's move now to the breakout room. Yes. So some of you were asking what are the breakout rooms for? I guess it's your first time in one of our life events. So the breakout rooms are just spaces or virtual rooms where you will meet your peers, your fellow learners in groups of eight people, right Arthur? So in each breakout room, eight people can fit. So you just go in, introduce yourself. Please, if you go into one breakout room, just stay in the breakout room and try to discuss and participate and be shy. Everyone is there for the first time. So just connect your camera, connect your audio and begin to talk. It's easy. And today the discussion is pretty informal. We won't be discussing any topic because it's just the beginning of the course. So we haven't learned anything yet. But we would like you to discuss why did you enroll at C1X? What are your expectations? What do you expect at the end of the course like to have? And if your goal is to complete the course and or a certificate that we expect most of you have this goal in mind, how do you plan to achieve it? Because in online courses there's a high rate of people who abandon after a few weeks because of course you don't have a teacher, they're just like, it's not mandatory to attend to a class, it's very flexible. So some people just give up. So we would like to, if this is your goal to complete the course, we would like to know what's your plan to achieve it? Because you should really think about a plan to achieve it and successfully complete the course. Okay, so how long are we going to leave them to discuss it? I think we can then, 10 minutes? 10 minutes, yeah, 10 minutes. So let's go to the breakout rooms now. You can just click on the one of these that are with room to do that. Discuss for eight minutes and after 10 minutes more or less, we are going to be back and we are going to give you some tips about how, based on previous learners, how you can achieve this goal of completing this course. Yes, and please after you come back from the breakout rooms give us your feedback through the general chat so we can comment on that too and see what your plan is and your feedback about that. And if you have any question, do not hesitate also to bring to the lobby and we will be happy to answer your questions. Excellent, see you in 10 minutes. See you in 10 minutes, bye.