 Hello everyone. All the supply chainers from across the globe. Thank you for joining us today. It's my pleasure to be here as a part of the team. We have been working towards this goal for a long time and so we're all happy to have you join us here. My name is Lita Das. I am a PhD candidate here at MIT CTL and I also serve as in the role of a data analyst for the MicroMasters and Supply Chain Management team and I'm going to be your emcee for today. So we also, just a quick note, we are broadcasting here from the newly constructed Computational and Visual Education Lab and Arthur is going to speak a few things about it later during the presentation. I hope that you all can join us for the entire duration of the event today, which is about 40 minutes or so. We have a line of speakers for you before we join you in congratulating you for your accomplishments in receiving the MicroMasters credential. So first we'll have Dr. Chris Caplis who's going to talk about how the program was created and how it was conceived. Next we are going to hear from Professor Sanjay Sarma who's going to talk about the genesis of the MicroMasters program. Then we'll have invite on stage Dr. Eva Ponce who's going to give a few highlights about the program and you can get a chance to know what your other colleagues have been doing so far and then we're going to zoom to you, our community of learners. We have people who are joining us from the Supply Chain Management Blended Masters team who are going to talk to us live from the studio and share some experiences and also from across the globe from many different time zones we have all of you guys, few of you sharing your experiences with us. And then we'll have Dr. Eva Ponce and Dr. Chris Caplis share congratulatory messages with the group and finally we'll close the celebration with a thank you. All right that's the agenda for today's presentation. So first I would like to introduce our first speaker for today. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Chris Caplis. He's the executive director of MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics and the Silver Family Research Fellow. He's the mastermind behind the MicroMasters Supply Chain Management Program credential and the director of the program. So he has dedicated countless number of hours in recording and re-formatting the videos all of which you are familiar with. I think he's filmed over 50 hours of course lecture but out from behind the lightboard this is probably the first time you're going to see him in the normal speed instead of the 2x time speed. So yeah brace yourself for it. Thank you Lita. So welcome and congratulations to all of you who've completed all five of the SCX MicroMasters courses and finished the sometimes grueling CFX exam. So you should be very proud of yourselves. You are now the second cohort that successfully completed the MicroMasters credential and supply chain management. There are now over a thousand of you out there who have earned these credentials from across the globe and they're using the knowledge and skills they've gained in this program to improve, advance their career, change to a new job or even go and get an advanced degree as many of us here in the audience are doing right now when they should be working on their thesis project problem. When I started this I certainly didn't imagine the magnitude of the response when I created my first video which was an SC1x the EOQ video and you can tell it was my first one. It's the most awkward one but when I did that it was mainly a side project something to do over the summer that would have helped me teach later in the fall and I had no idea that what I created for the online course would eclipse anything that I've done here at MIT especially in the residential programs and so while some of the content in the online course is directly taken from my previous work and my previous classes the vast majority was created from scratch and actually it changed the way that we teach here that I teach here at MIT so what I've done it online has changed and influenced what I now do here but to make this kind of impact that we've made for the MicroMasters you need to have a strong team and I'm very lucky in that respect the SCX team here was actually led by Dr. Eva Ponce and she has her primary course leads who've been a part of this cohort Dr. Sergio Caballero, Dr. Alex Bateman and Dr. Inma Brello was hiding in the corner and countless TAs and community TAs. Arthur Grau who you know very well has developed and cultivated the community and Connor Mikowski who you might not have known as well is behind all the technical things that we're doing. Lita and her cohort Yinjin Li have also been working with us in both beta testing and creating a lot of the problems in addition to the data analysis and I'm not the only instructor. I'm joined as well by Professor Yosi Sheffi, Dr. Jared Gensel, Dr. Bruce Arnson, Jim Rice and Chris Casa and they've all done work here and you've enjoyed hopefully their lectures and their lessons but the team goes beyond that what we have here at CTL to the Office of Digital Learning in MITx where Lana Scott and her teams help film, edit and assemble over a hundred hours of video and lessons and recitations not just mine. Shara Frugman led the development and technical aspects of the platform that you all love so much and Jim Cain filmed and produced all of those lightboard videos that you guys enjoyed. Dana Doyle, Lisa Eichel, David Chotin have led the administrative aspects of all aspects of this course along with Maria Cruz who's led the marketing for the MicroMasters that we have and the edX itself led mainly by Professor Anand Agarwal who provided the support for us and the vision to help us with this program as well as Melanie McFarland, Derek Hixson, Maddie Stevens and Jennifer Akana specifically with the CFX and helped us run those kind of things and of course none of this would have been possible without Professor Sanjay Sarma who you hear from shortly it was his idea and he founded the entire idea the MicroMasters along with President Rafael Reif who had the vision and fortitude to push us through to democratize education. So you can see it takes a village to actually run and develop a MicroMasters program and hopefully you appreciate all the effort that everyone put on here we appreciate all of your effort so congratulations again on earning the MicroMasters credential you've demonstrated not only academic prowess in conquering the skills that we taught you but you've also shown determination and grit and you should be very proud of yourself so hopefully I look forward to meeting you each of you sometime as you advance in your career thank you very much I'll give it back to you Lita. Thank you Chris. So next we have Professor Sanjay Sarma who will be joining us from Lima Professor Sarma is a faculty member at in mechanical engineering and vice president of open learning at MIT. He manages open courseware and is an ardent supporter of digital learning and the massive open online courses on MOOCs so we're going to pan it over to him. Thank you Lita. Folks you know I'm sitting here in a hotel in Lima Peru staring at the Pacific Ocean and I'm thinking of how humankind arrived here at some point a few people decided in Asia to cross the bedding straight and land in America centuries later actually several thousand years later the Vikings got on a boat and said we're setting sail and then later on Columbus and the rest of Europe arrived what were the thoughts in the minds of that first group that got on a boat and said I will sail into the unknown you know it's sort of a profound thing about humanity everything we take for granted started with someone taking a step into the unknown so here we are two and a half years after my first conversation with the professor Sheffi and Dr. Kapless a pivotal conversation where we started drawing stuff on a whiteboard and you ladies and gentlemen are now setting sail on a new boat into a new extraordinary future the supply chain has shaped the world whether it's the silk route the discovery of America or Uber or Lyft or drone delivery and we are in a very special time here in the 21st century where the supply chain will continue to shape everything we do whether it's logistics or shipping and so it is with great pleasure that we herald your sailing mission as you launch your careers it's been an absolute honor and a pleasure to have you go through this this process it's been an honor and a pleasure to work with professor Sheffi with Chris Kapless and Dr. Eva Ponseth and all the others and it's been an honor and a pleasure for our office and MIT to have you here so with that all the best congratulations and we look forward to following you with as admirers in the future thank you professor Sarma for the encouraging and inspiring words and thank you Chris again for both for your mentorship during my phd and also for giving me the opportunity to be a part of the team that has been making this vision into a reality all right next I would like to take this opportunity to invite Dr. Eva Ponseth a few words about her she is the person who has invested so much of her energy so much of her care into the into this program Dr. Ponseth came to the micro masters initially when the courses were being built and since then she has tirelessly led the course team towards making courses consistent and challenging she's also the person who keeps an eye on all of you encouraging you to verify in the few courses that are coming up so that you can earn your micro masters credential and today's celebration is one of the results of a dedication so please thank you lita no I think I might go thank you lita and thank you Chris thank you for giving me the opportunity to be part of this team and this fascinating program I still remember when you offered me this position he asked me do you want to have fun around a fun program so yes for sure I didn't imagine how much fun I'm having now this is a fascinating program I'm really grateful to be part of this community of SCX learners I'm also grateful about the feedback we receive every single day for you learners for your contributions you are helping us to make this program better and improving this every single day so thank you so much thank you for your hard work for your suggestion and for all of your investment in this program all of all of your efforts I want to share with you some statistics so first of all you are part of a huge community of SCX learners nearly a quarter of a million of people have taken at least one SCX courses we also have that more than 15,000 verified learners and 8,000 unique learners that have earned a certificate in a SCX course and now we have granted more than 1,000 micro master credentials and the second micro master cohort that we are celebrating today having last February 2018 so we are very proud of all of you and I really want to congratulate all of you for this achievement in terms of the level of education and some statistics about the the these micro masters holders we have people from around 90 countries the most represented country is united state we have 344 micro master holders from the united state the second most represented country is spain both spaniers 62 people from spain and we have also 51 from india brasil and mexico and as i mentioned almost 90 countries represented in this community in terms of the level of education most of our micro master holder already have a bachelor master degree or even a phd degree um in terms of the age we have um oh okay in terms of gender i really want to encourage ladies to be part of this program this is because of the nature of MOOCs we have still have more male than female and maybe also because of the nature of the supply chain management but i really want to encourage you ladies go to this program go to this field there are a lot of opportunities in supply chain management also for you um in terms of the age the most let's say the person with more experience has 72 years old the youngest one 14 the twins with 14 years old and then the average age is in between 25 30 38 38 years old so now um we have these 1062 micro masters holders um for most of you maybe this is the first step in supply chain management the second the fifth what i can tell you i don't think this is the your last step i think this is the beginning of a new career in supply chain management and there are many more opportunities in supply chain that are open now for you so if you want to pursue for a master degree here at MIT or at any other universities we have now 10 universities recognizing the micro master as a pathway for credit for earning a master degree we are also we also have companies offering jobs to supply to these micro master holders GE is an example we have an agreement with GE they are sending their employees to our program and they are also offering uh interviews opportunities for micro master holders here in massachusetts there is another company in brazil they have now two job openings for micro masters holders and more companies are recognizing the micro master credential in supply chain management so it's also an opportunity um there is many other ways to to continue learning in supply chain management executive education bootcamps many other ways to other micro masters so that is like i would say the beginning of a new of a new way to learn more and this is the beautiful thing of learning never ends so this is something something really nice so again congratulations micro masters holders um i would like to introduce you now Arthur Grau Arthur is our community manager he's always behind the scene he's always behind the life events um also today running this event and is also encouraging this a community of micro master learners so i want to introduce you uh Arthur Arthur please thank you so now i have a microphone yes it's your turn yes so i got everything together except i don't have a script so um i no it's fine what what really i just wanted to call out was the fact that we're in the cave today so um thanks to Matias for letting us have access to the cave all the fun cool effects that i'm playing with back here are because of the cave and i just wanted to thank you all as well for giving me the opportunity to be part of this team and to all of you who i communicate with online in uh i chat and messenger and all of that stuff keep it coming i think i can still handle it and maybe i can get Connor to build me an auto responding robot or something like that thank you Arthur at this time we would like to take an opportunity to recognize all of you who are joining us from across the globe across multiple time zones thank you again it's such a pleasure to have you all here and Eva is going to share a few more congratulatory messages yes okay so congratulations to all of you for this hard work for all of the nights that you have spent in this program i know you have families you have jobs many of their commitments and you put a lot of effort in this program also this uh after 15 months 18 months in this long journey with us you have demonstrated greed and you have lemon demonstrate a lot of hard work so congratulations congratulations to you to your family to your friends to all of these people that also support you to to to have this uh achievement today um also uh you are now ambassadors you are now the best way to represent this program so i i also encourage you to share your experience with other people tell them about this experience uh through this uh micro masters uh micro master credential so with that i need to say thank you thank you to the team to the scx team to all of the course leads i have working to this team also the teaching assistant they are spending a lot of hours to try to provide the best learning experience to you so i really need to say thank you to the to the team also to the open open learning and MITx and also edX our the platform and all of the team that are helping us with every single issue that we have almost every single day so thank you to all congratulations again and let's hear now from from our learners yeah all across the world thank you congratulations again nice work i know the effort must have been a lot uh but now we're excited to hear from our community of learners uh we'll go across different time zones so first we'll pan to uh to lima uh and we have gabriel and uh diego from there who will be sharing a few experiences with us you guys are live hi to everybody hello we need to leave a poll to the all to the all the lovely uh micro master community my name is gabriel my username in the courses was gabriel armando and it's a pleasure to be here with you hello um my name is diego and also it's a pleasure to be here and to be part of this great community um i recently finished the the the course and i wanted to speak about my experience uh because it's the first time i i i have studied in an online course and before before this i i really didn't recognize it as a good way to study but after doing the masters i think that it has been a very good experience and i will be looking forward to to do uh do this again no i have a uh a full-time job and a family to attend and uh well in lima there's a lot of traffic and it's very difficult it's very difficult to to to commute from one place to another and i could manage to to to use my time in a much better way like for example in my job coming early or living later getting some time from a lunch time and i'm working through these uh through the problems or doing some course no and i think it was a a really good experience for me because it brought technology uh to my study life no um i hope uh i can continue with with with with this uh with this kind of study um and to promote it through through my community no thank you very much and i'll see you soon thank you both uh thank you for the encouraging words we now uh we'll now go to MIT Scale Center at Zaragoza uh well it's the first location of the MIT Cambridge to accept blended master students and we have Martin from there to share his experiences with us hello everyone this is Martin here from Spain it's my pleasure to see how the micro masters community in supply chain management is growing and i want to congratulate all of you who have participated in in the online courses so far i think we we all together have made a great decision i was uh in the first part in the first cohort uh of micro masters and uh i really want would like to share with you a few impressions from the life after receiving the credential so i applied for the blended program which allowed me to join the the bio new cohort in Cambridge in January this year um together with the residential and blended students of MIT and from other scale centers uh we had the full month fully immersed with with interesting lectures and participating in contests working together with a lot of people in changing compositions interesting assignments it was really an amazing time over there and after this uh i came here to Spain starting the online semester sorry the onsite semester um uh of the scm of the blended program here which is called C-Log and i can really tell you that the blended uh has all the rights has earned all the rights because it is really amazing how well it blends um what we have learned in the micro masters with the curriculum of the residential students and how in the past months with the guest professors and with the with the professors at the set lc with the sargossa logistic centers we have learned a lot on top of what we already learned in the in the micro masters to address the challenges that are out there so i invite all of you there to give it a thought think about it if it makes sense for you to make this step into the onsite classroom learning uh and to complement what you have achieved so far with uh something with the with the blended program i really enjoyed it and i think it was the right thing to do thanks to everyone for making this possible everyone at MIT and i wish all of you the best and hope to see you soon at any alumni event thank you thank you martin uh now we have a few learners right here joining us live in the studio so we have gin lee queenie chan joti and jeff baker so we would like to invite you on stage to share a few experiences from on the campus uh so hello uh this is joti and i'm from bangladesh so hello from bangladesh and uh so uh congratulations to you all the second micro masters credential holders the second batch of it and as part of as the part of the first batch so we have become the seniors right so yeah so congrats to us all so uh isn't it amazing that this love and passion for supply chain how these things has brought all of us together in this one point that is micro masters and for me personally uh this uh what can i say that the application of the supply chain management has really made me interested in the supply chain management thing and when i get this opportunity to learn this subject from MIT you really cannot afford to you know let it just go right so and i want to thank once again this micro masters team for materializing this uh excellent concept of micro masters and right now we are in this campus definitely i would very much i mean highly encourage you to apply for this blended masters program it's really challenging it's literally drinking water from fire hose but at the same time it's i would say it's rewarding so you will imagine how much you can learn even from your classmates i couldn't learn it from the amazing uh MIT resources they have you you can access this amazing MIT resources and at the same time you can experience this great campus you will become the part of this great MIT alumni so i would invite all to let us build an even stronger community and let us put all of all of our efforts to make this world a better place thank you very much yeah thank you judy um hello congratulations um you made it yeah i'm yeah i'm jenny and it's my pleasure to be here today and i i want to say like the the micro masters really a great innovation and i i do love it um so um before i came to Cambridge i was thinking yeah what will be the like a very difference between like a study online and the study like inside campus but after five months i i should tell you that it's it's really different and it's yeah it's really different and we are very different people from different countries and we super different background and but however we are also like very similar people we are all people with a very strong um well we are all people like a self strong self-driven people and with passion and ambition um it's an amazing family and please try your best to join and um thank you we're waiting for you hi everyone this is queenie i'm from Hong Kong i have a great pleasure to be here in MIT and i'm very happy that i learned many people here and they are very happy and eager to exchange their idea uh so don't wait uh if you want to apply for the program or this year or next year so please come to join us thank you congratulations again hi i'm jeff i'm from the from the united states uh chicago so if chicago's in the house welcome um i want to say you know add my congratulations congratulations well done but you're not done so this is this is lifelong learning okay we're all living longer longer more productive lives uh we can contribute far into our 50 60 70s whatever um so online continuing education becomes important so it's a it's a it's a journey it's not a destination um even though you know on that that distribution curve i was a little bit over on the right hand side about two standard deviations i think um but even like with 25 years of experience i'm still learning stuff new every single micro master's course learning something new my classmates my professors here so keep that spark alive okay always uh try to be learning and continue on in fact i think you know MITx you know and now say i have a data science uh micro masters i think about 30 of us jumped on like yeah when can we start that so even though we will finish our thesis first i promise first and even though we will finish it first um but if you're here listening to us um you're already that that passionate committed lifelong learner and my recommendation is just keep that spark alive okay this is a milestone on your journey congratulations thank you all it's nice to hear about those wonderful experiences and uh also that you're having fun here um now we are joined by Param Paramayur Paramayur is joining from Bhuvaneshwar my hometown Orissa he is a credential earner like most of you but at the same time he's also one of our most prolific community teaching assistants so much so that many of you are wondered has he built a robot to answer all the questions 24 hours uh well he's going to tell us about that okay hi everyone thank you lita i really appreciate the opportunity to be part of this unique celebration a big thank you to MIT for making such an awesome course available to the entire global community i really appreciate that i was lucky to be joining sc0x when it was first launched and i managed to continue the whole recommended sequence all the way till cfx uh throughout this journey there are uh three things that i would like to share with the community here uh the first one was uh the boxy example that Chris talks about in sc0x that was the first time i saw a very simple mathematical concept applied to a real world situation and i think that was when i realized that i have found the right course i immediately turned very fine and i decided to pursue the entire course based on that so that was really a turning point uh the second turning point was the cta experience i would say in my two decades of professional life being the cta has possibly been the most fulfilling experience ever we start off thinking that we are community we are contributing back to the community but make no mistake it's a completely selfish way to learn something new every day for the rest of your life so i really appreciate the cta opportunity uh the last thing i would like to talk about is the way as cta is we consolidated the feedback from the student community and we share it back to the course leads uh the way it is used to improve the course in the subsequent runs both in terms of content as well as the delivery this positive feedback loop is what gives me confidence that we will continue to be number one in this league for the foreseeable future i would like to just conclude by saying that i'm very proud to be part of this global niche community as eva said we are just say 1000 so each of one is literally one in a million at the same time i'm sure all of us will make mit proud by applying our learnings into innovating something in our area of influence and making a difference thank you very much and good luck to all thank you param and thank you for staying up this late and joining us from india we now move to seattle in us uh so there also we are joined by a growing clan of micromasters credential holders and we have john ray from microsoft who is hosting a few others as well we're going to hear from them how's it going can you guys hear me yep um thank you for allowing us to be here today um i am part of the first cohort my name is john ray and gala um and i'd like to take the time to introduce everyone here kori pritz um i've owned my own business and uh took the uh first cohort and then uh finally passed the test on the second go around hi my name is jay troublesy so i'm the second cohort so i'm working also with john ray here at microsoft hey i'm cosmos digerian cto i fulcrum and i'm also part of the first cohort cool i'd like to first say thank you uh thank you to all of you guys who are able to give us this opportunity to learn uh if it wasn't for this program i wouldn't have been able to land my dream job and right now i'm the global supply planner for xbox and xbox accessories globally so i am doing eoq on a daily basis on a weekly basis relating to one global manufacturers meeting forecast management around the world so if it wasn't for this course it wasn't for this program uh i would not be here so first off i want to say thank you and second i want to congratulate everyone uh in who earned this credential uh those are part of the first cohort and second core we can understand the sacrifices you have to go through uh managing your day to day if you're working if you're a parent um and then be able to invest the time on a weekly basis to learn the material uh i would say that it is worthwhile um and i can use use my myself in this example so um congratulations and thank you and welcome to um this awesome group and so i recommend connecting with others in your community as we have in seattle um and leveraging the network that mit can um offer you uh it's awesome i think i would just echo um one the quality coming from the military we have a lot of online programs as we try to reduce costs and not move people around and i can speak that this program uh absolutely phenomenal quality in the material and then the day-to-day tools that i uh learned from that and my ability to help small businesses uh and their struggle to understand how they fit into supply chains is just it's reinforced every day that i run my business uh and utilizing the tools that i learned from this course uh so that's what uh i'd say thank you uh and then uh i appreciate from the course hi everyone uh also i want to really thank you this program has uh had a huge impact on my life so basically after the micro masters i managed to find my have you i completely changed career and managed to find my dream job in my dream company so so this program works this program gives great opportunity and it's definitely a game changer so i can't thank you enough even though i met you a couple of months ago as a part of uh second cohort and i said for the exam in boston but uh yeah thank you thank you thank you thank you congratulations everybody for completing the program uh i know it was a lot of work uh i i enjoyed a lot i learned a lot from it uh i build software for supply chain day today and education from MIT has given me the confidence to sit in and talk to supply chain experts and make sure that i speak the same language that they do and kind of work together to you know build software to make their lives easier but really what i wanted to take this opportunity to encourage all of you is to consider continuing education and supply chain if you have a chance to attend one of the scx boot camps if they happen again in the future uh highly recommend it um that's something that i did last summer and i learned a lot from that above and beyond what we learned in the program one of the nice things about the online programs you can learn it from anywhere but one of the challenges is that you don't have you know the same kind of community feeling that you have when you're in a classroom surrounded by other people some of you are much better about communicating online with other people and being part of the chat rooms and and the discussion boards i was really terrible at that so being able to be on campus for a whole week and meet other people and sit there and work the case studies and discuss things after hours and over drinks it was a really fantastic opportunity and if you haven't done it already i highly recommend it congratulations again thank you all for those encouraging words thank you for being such a motivated and a passionate community of supply chainers uh it's a pleasure to know all of you and have you here um i'm going to hand this over to Eva now yes okay so it has been a pleasure to have you all in this program congratulations again i'm looking at the future keep up this uh energy the positive energy you bring to this program you are now a representative across the world so i'm sure you are continuing adding value to this program um let's uh ask for a round of applause to this second micro master cohort in supply chain management congratulations