 Good morning or good afternoon, depending on where you are. And welcome to our first live event of SC0X, Supply Chain Analytics. I'm here at MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics in Boston, and I invited Eva Ponze. Welcome Eva. Thank you so much. My pleasure to be here. So Eva Ponze is our Executive Director for the MicroMasters and Supply Chain Management Program here at CTL. I'm very happy that she took the time to share with us her knowledge and her experience. My name is Alex Rotkopf, and I'm here as a research scientist at CTL and also your course lead for SC0X. So welcome again to our first live event here. We are very happy to see that so many people all around the world are joining us today. We've prepared a little agenda that we are going to loosely follow today. We started with the welcome already. And so we have three topics to cover. The first one is the big picture we call it. It's about the MicroMasters, and we're going to introduce it to our total program. Then we are going to cover SC0X, Supply Chain Analytics, so the details of this specific course that you are enrolled in currently, and then move to our course logistics. So we are going to talk about how you succeed in the course, how you interact with the platform, and what kind of cool tools we have available for you to succeed. In addition to this discussion about course logistics, we invited Dipti Biswali and Jeff Baker. These are your fellow learners that already completed the Supply Chain program here at MIT. And we invited them for you to get tips on how to successfully complete it, so they will have some insights on how they did it, how they worked through the program and managed their professional and private life and in addition to that course. So before we get started, I wanted to introduce you to Slido. Slido is our new tool that we are going to use to interact with you. So in a different browser window, just open slide.do and enter the code, which is a hashtag SC0X, although I don't think that you need to enter the hashtag that is already done in Slido. And if you go into Slido, you will have two tabs on top of it. So one is Questions and one is Polls. The Questions tab allows you to ask questions that we are going to answer them. So you just write a question down there and put your name to it. We're going to preference those that have put their name in. And while the questions come in and are put into the queue, you also have the opportunity to vote on a question. So there is a thumbs up. And the more thumbs up it gets, the further up in the queue it is, so the more people that are interested in a certain question, the more likely we are going to address that first. So when you ask a question, please also scroll through the questions that are already there to not put a second question in that essentially asks the same. We are also doing polls. So there is this second tab that is polls. And this is our way to ask you a question and see what you think about that. And I'm going to release the first poll now. And this is about your MOOC experience. So we want to know if you have ever interacted with the MOOC before, any online course, or if you have already some experience with other courses that we have provided here at MITx MicroMasters and Supply Chain Management. So while we are talking, please take the time to let us know what you have in terms of MOOC experience. Anyways, so let's talk about the details of our program, the big picture, Eva. Excellent. OK, so thank you so much. Welcome again to this first live event for SC0x. We are all very excited to be here today. So in terms of the program, the program has been developed at MIT, the Center for Transportation and Logistics. This CTL has more than 40 years of experience. It was created in 1973. The main goal is to create supply chain innovation and drive it into practice. We have three main legs in the center. Research, we have more than 15 full-time researchers working in different labs and research projects. We have also outreach. This is the part that we collaborate with companies, organizations, and other institutions. We have a strong relationship with our partners, with these companies. We have more than 50 companies that are part of the center. This is an essential part of the center because all of the research we are conducting here is very industry-applied, industry-oriented. And the third part is education. In education, we have been providing, since 1987, the first supply chain management master degree that is ranked as the first master degree in this field, the supply chain management. So we also provide PhD programs in logistics and executive education. In fall 2015, the MicroMaster Program in supply chain management was announced. This was a very innovative initiative in education because it was the first step of moving to online education, online learning, online teaching, and also combined with what we call a BLENDY program that is an on-campus program. So we started in fall 2015, and now we have a huge community of SCX learners. So more than 245,000 students has been enrolled in at least one of our SCX courses. 15,000 of those learners are verified learners. Later, I will clarify what means to be a verified learner. These learners are from more than 190 countries from all over the world. So we have a very nice representation of people from India, from Brazil, from Mexico, from Nigeria, from different countries, different continents, which make this program, from my point of view, very rich in terms of the diversity of the students. Today, we had issue more than 1,000 MicroMaster credentials. In terms of the guiding principles, there are some general principles that are MIT and CTL principles. The first is to educate the world for free and also to provide a credential with a minimum cost. There are also some specific goals that we have in our SCX courses and more specifically in SCX course. The first one is to provide the best learning experience to our learners. And the second one, for those that are pursuing for a certificate, we really want to provide a rigorous assessment and ensure the value of this certificate. In terms of the MicroMaster, the MicroMaster includes five massive open online courses. Anyone from anywhere that has a laptop or a computer with internet connectivity can enroll in this program. The program includes supply chain analytics, supply chain fundamentals, supply chain design, supply chain dynamics, and supply chain technology. Five courses that cover the fundamental concepts behind the supply chains. Finally, at the very end of the program, for those that completed and pass the five SCX courses, you need to take a final comprehensive exam. This is a proctor exam that you need to pass before earning the MicroMaster credential. In terms of the contents and how we connect and design the five courses. So we started with SCX. SCX provides you kind of a toolbox where we are going to review the basic techniques, tools, methods that you need to know in order to apply to real problems in supply chain. Alex will go deeper into the contents that we are going to review in SC0X. In SC1X, what we are going to do is some of these techniques that you have learned in SC0X, you are going to apply in different relevant problems in supply chain. You are going to apply in inventory management, demand forecasting, and transportation management. Then we move to supply chain design. Supply chain design, we care about the three main flows in a supply chain. These are the flow of materials, the flow of information, and the finance flow. So we cover different lessons in order to provide you tools and real situations that you need to, for instance, design a network distribution for a company, or you need to integrate these material and information flows. And also we cover some lessons related to finance in supply chain. Then we move to SC3X and SC4X. These are more qualitative courses. Let's say that SC0, SC1 and SC2 are more quantitative and we have a strong focus on the analytic tools, the math methods, always with an industry approach, a very applied approach, but we need to review this concept and these tools. And then we move to SC3X and SC4X. We bring here more real life problems, more complexity, complexity is inherent to this reality. So in SC3X, we introduce this complexity and its sojourn factors that impact the supply chains. And in SC4X, we focus more on big data, database management and also machine learning techniques that help you to have some tools that allows you to understand and to analyze big data. And we also cover ERP system, enterprise resource planning system, those intra-organizational system, also inter-organizational system, system that allows companies to connect with each other. And at the very end, we provide a final comprehensive exam to complete the MicroMaster program. In terms of cost and duration, each course, if you want to pursue for the certificate, each course costs $200. The total cost of the program is $1,200. And in terms of effort on average, our learners dedicated in between 8 to 12 hours per week. But again, this depends on your math background and depends also on your supply chain management background. The duration, all of the courses follow exactly the same structure, 13 weeks, the first four weeks of contents, then we provide a meter exam, a week off, another four weeks of contents, another week off, and then the final exam. In terms of the value proposition, why we are doing that? We are providing here our individual professional career development. Most of our learners are using the MicroMaster credential as a way to apply to a job in supply chain management. We are also offering this program for companies that want to use this as part of the training development program. Some of our students are doing this program because they want to apply to a master degree. And this credential is a pathway to a master degree here at MIT to the master degree program in supply chain management. And it's also a pathway to apply for a master degree in other universities. Zaragoza in Spain is offering a blended program. Some universities in Australia are offering the second part of the MicroMaster. Let's say that a blended program based on the MicroMaster program, Rochester Institute of Technology, the USA Purdue University, and some other universities in Europe, in Latin America, and also in the United States. So it's a way to earn a master degree at MIT or any other university that is recognizing the MicroMaster credential as a pathway for credits. Okay, yes. If we're taking a look at our MOOC experience question here. Sure. So we see that we have a lot of students, a third of the students that have already completed at least one online course. So we have a pretty experienced crowd, I would say. I would say. And we have even 40% that took some course in our MITX program already. Excellent. So I'm very happy to hear that. The question, this is great. I also encourage you to take the courses in order. The program is designed to take first zero, then one, two, three, and four. Having said that, it's possible to take another course before. Some of our students started with one and then come back to zero. Zero is like the toolbox, but if you have the opportunity to take this in order, we really encourage you to do that. However, there are some students that take some courses in parallel. Yeah. Okay, that's great. Yeah. So perhaps we move to the course content, the SC0X content in detail, a closer look. So before we go into the details of that, I wanted to post a second poll to see what your most favorable topics are. So as Eva mentioned already, the SC0X is the first course of the five courses that we are offering in the program. And it's going to be the toolbox. I like to think of that as really the toolbox that you are carrying throughout our courses and throughout your professional career that we're providing here as a baseline. And we have essentially eight topics that we're going to cover in the next weeks. And I'm providing here a poll on what kind of techniques you are most eager, most interested in learning if you think about your background. So while I'm going through that, please provide perhaps some intuition to us what you have already, what you're expecting from here. So if we are looking at the course content of SC0X, it's essentially it's two main building blocks. One covers deterministic settings. So settings where we know what is going to happen. And the other block talks about stochastic settings. So problems where we not exactly know what is going to happen in the future. The deterministic part is going to be the first four weeks that we're going to cover. And we already released week one with our basic functions and algebra discussion. So we're trying to build a baseline of your math, mathematical background. So but it's essentially what you have been learning already in the past in your school. Then we're going to discuss unconstrained optimization which is very important if you want to make, for example, inventory decisions. So how much do you want to order? You need unconstrained optimization for that. Move then to constraint optimization. It's a very powerful tool like linear programming, for example, that you have to, for example, make a decision on how much, how do you want to schedule your production? And mixed integer programming belongs to that class. And we're going to spend some time on that too because they are very powerful and very important techniques. So for example, decide where to put warehouses. Because the problems are complex, we're going also discuss algorithms and approximations. That makes it easier to solve these problems in practice. That's important to us to have a toolbox that is actually applicable. And then we are going to write our midterm exam and move then to the second block, which is week seven to 10, to discuss the stochastic problems. Stochasticity plays a big role because we don't know exactly how much demand we're going to face, how good quality is from a supplier or how their lead times are going to be. So we're going to need some tool set to cover that. And this is essentially probability distributions which we are going to introduce in a very practical way. And then use different empirical methods such as statistical testing, regression or even simulation models to grasp that uncertainty. And finally, we end with queuing theory. This is a specific class of problems where we want to model each customer individual in a service system. And we're going to cover that in week 10, including discrete event simulation because it's a clever way to actually operationalize that. So if I'm looking at our analysis here in the polls, let's see, oh, about simulation, people are very excited about that. Simulation because they already get the feeling that this is going to be very applied. The good news is that you are going to have a lesson in SC0X at the very end about simulation. Yeah, absolutely. I also see that people are not so much excited about hypothesis testing and regression analysis. But then you say it's very useful. So let's see what you think after taking this lesson. Yeah, so it's going to be important, especially in the next courses, where we need hypothesis testing and regression, for example, for forecasting. So it's going to be very important. Let's see how you like it afterwards. And people are also very excited about linear programming, mixed interior, linear programming. And I can't see why because this has a lot of application in network design models. We use and implement a lot of linear programming and mixing linear programming in SC2X, supply chain design. That is the basic tool we use for network design models. We use it every day ourselves, right? Every day as a researcher. It's one of the tools that we also use. So looking at our demographics, our SC0X community is growing every day. We have already 17,500 learners and 680 of them are verified. So we're hoping that more of you come in as verified students, of course, but we're very happy that we see that. I would say especially if you are interested in earning a certificate, is the main reason to become a very, very good student. So our students are pretty young, median is 30, but I looked up the statistics. We have also a lot of students that are 14 above. So experienced people are also on board. We have 88% of college degree or higher. So a lot of knowledge out there already. And what I like the most is we have 170 countries represented, right? So it's going to be a great discussion in the forums with all that different perspectives and expertises, that's something that is very important. Which are the most representative countries? Yeah. The most represented is US, of course. They have always around 20 to 25%. And India, interestingly to me, that was really surprising, but India is very... We're represented. Very, very represented. And then we have Canada and Brazil with 3%. And then a lot of other countries that are between 2% and 3%. Yeah. Good. So our course schedule. We already started the course. That's why you are here, right? On 4th of April and already released week one yesterday. The course will run until 4th of July, Independence Day. Yes. And you should be aware that you can enroll until the 25th of April. So you are enrolled, otherwise you wouldn't be here. But if you want to let other colleagues or friends or even family know, they can enroll until the 24th of April. And the verification deadline that you were talking about before is May 2nd for this run. So you need to make up your mind to become verified until that time. Yes, definitely. We need to say also that the new dates are not flexible at all. That means that this is the deadline. And unfortunately, we cannot extend this deadline. So please, if you make your decision as soon as possible, after you ask to make that, complete the process. Because it's not always... It never is good to wait until the very end of the deadline in order to do the thing. So as soon as possible, once you make your decision. I wanted to cover the key dates for the exams because I saw there's also a question already coming up about the exam. So we are going to have two exams. We have the midterm exam, which we are going to open in the beginning of week 6. So this is May 16th. And you will have one week to finish that exam. It's going to be a timed exam where you have... When you start, you can choose whenever you want to start within that one week. But when you start, you have exactly four hours to complete it. And the same is with the final exam, which will be opened in the 12th week on 27 June. Again, you can choose whenever you want to within that week to start. But when you start, you need to do it within the four hours. So my recommendation is to book a reasonable a lot of time now in your agenda. So you are sure that you can complete this midterm and final exam. Excellent. So we have two types of students. We have verified and audit the students. Audit the students, you just need to enroll in the course and you will have access to the videos, the quick questions and the practice program. If you want to pursue for a certificate, then you need to upgrade your status to be a verified student. That means that there are two main steps to be a verified student. The first one is to upgrade the status and to pay $200. This is the fee. And it's just the administrative fee in order to issue the certificate. It's in the main page of the course. Just go to the left side and there is an upgrade button, the green button in order to complete this process. So pay this $200 is the first part. Just need to complete this form and complete the payment. The second step, this is also very important is the ID verification. So once you pay the fee, you need to verify your identity. And I really, really encourage you to do this right after the verification process. The only way to earn a certificate in SC0x is for those that make the payment but also verify their identity. Otherwise, you are not going to receive the certificate. And of course, you need to pass the data assignments and the final ammeter exam. Benefits for verified learners. The main one is if you want to pursue for the certificate, it's mandatory to complete this process. Also, if you want to be part of the MicroMaster program and your intention is to complete the five SCX courses and earn the credential at the very end, you need to do every single course as a verified student. Also, we are providing these life events. This first life event is open to all of the students enrolling SC0x. However, the second and the third is only for verified students. So it's an extra service we are providing for this verified student. Finally, you also have access to the MicroMaster Supplemental Material. This is a section that we have each week. We provide there extra problems, some master thesis, some extra documentation. This is not the core material from the course. This is just supplemental material. So, yeah, so this in terms of the contents. Perhaps an interesting question from a tour guide who asks about a different opportunity. Could you share with us the average number of students accepted in the blended program every year so that relates a little bit to what we're offering here because there is a follow-up program, right, a connected program. Sure, so the blended program, this is the master degree in supply chain management that we are offering here at MIT. You can only apply to this program if you are a MicroMaster Credential Holder. You need to complete these five courses plus the CFX and then apply to the blend. So, last year when we have the first cohort of MicroMaster Holders, they completed in May 2017 125 learners apply for 40 slots for this blended program. Only 40 students got admission into the program and I need to say that it's very competitive. But however, those that complete the MicroMaster Credential and has interest in this blended program, I really encourage you to apply to the program. Yeah, and see if there is any chance to be admitted. Yeah, okay, so there are two options in order to become a verified student as an individual. We are also offering group enrollment for companies. So in this case, we need a minimum of 10 people in order to have this group enrollment option. We need one contact from the company or the organization that want to promote these among their employees. We are going to work directly with the Office of Digital Learning and edX here and provide these company codes and the learner need to use the code in order to become a verified student. There is a new option that we just started offering now starting this April is from now to forward for the new courses that are coming. This is for individuals. So any of you that from now knows that want to pursue for the whole program, then you can pay now upfront for the six courses, the five SCX courses plus the CFX. If this is the case, then you are going to have a 10% discount. So instead of paying $1,200, you are going only to pay $1,080. You must be enrolled within 24 months. This means that in 24 months, you should complete the whole program, the five courses plus the CFX. And this is completely doable in general, on average, typically a resident take like 12 months to complete the whole program. You can choose from different runs, but this only apply from now to the future courses, not for the past courses. So this is related to the verification. Let's try now to share the experience with our learners. So we have invited two of our micro master learners. Please join us. We have with us Dipty and Jeff. They are here to share their experience as a micro master learners with you. I need to say that they are also blended students. So we are going to go through some questions I really want to share with you how we are delivering the contents and mainly ask Dipty and Jeff about their experience as a micro masters students. So before we start the discussions, let me just introduce one other poll because I want to get our students thinking about how much time they want to put into our course. So how much time do you dedicate to SCSRX? How much time are you planning to dedicate? Something below six hours, something seven to eight, nine to 10, 11 to 12, or more than $30. Let us know what you have planned and we'll see how our learners here have experienced that. Excellent. And while that runs, we can go through and see what we do. Yeah, so I'm going to focus now on them, how we deliver contents. So we have two space in our SCX courses. We have the learning space. In the learning space, we share videos, quick questions and practice problem. And we really encourage collaboration here. We really like to see the study groups. We really like to see you in the forums asking questions and we love to see your peers answering these questions. Our amazing group of community teaching assistants also helping you. So this is really all about learning. And our goal here is just to provide the best learning experience that we can provide definitely in terms of enhanced teaching, enhanced learning and encourage this collaboration. So these in terms of learning, we also offer assessment. Because we are offering a credential, we need to assess the knowledge of these learners in order to provide this credential. That's why we have great assignment, weekly data assignment. We also have a meter and we also have a final exam. In this case, it's not a group work. This is an individual work. And we care a lot about that. So we have here an email account, a CCDOX health email account. We have a FICA, she's our teaching assistant. She is the third time that is doing this job with us and she's great trying to help you, assisting you, trying to making you the life easier in this sense. So you always can send an email directly to us, to the MIT staff, if you have any question related to assessment. The most important thing here is we do not allow any collaboration in assessment. So we do not allow to post you any question related to assessment in the discussion forum. That's why we separate these two spaces in our courses. In terms of how we deliver the contents. So if you go to week one, that we are going to release. We have already released. Already released yesterday. On Wednesday, yes. Yesterday. If you go through week one, you will have to start with the first lesson. We always introduce the lesson using the light board. So the main instructor that for this course is Chris Capples, Dr. Chris Capples. He in the light board, he's going to introduce the different concept he's going to cover and teach you during this week. With these videos, you have also transcripts. You can also double-speed Chris. You can also stop it. Go back or forward. So this is like my recommendation, but let's see what Jeff and Dipty think about that. My recommendation definitely is to start with the videos and then let's go to the quick question and the practice problem. So these are the videos. Then we go through the lessons. We have chunk of videos, like seven minutes quick question, another chunk of videos, another quick question to fix the concept and then move to practice problem. A little bit more elaborate problems before taking the grade assignment. So I would love to have Jeff, your experience. How did you review this material before the grade assignment every single week? Yeah, so what I found was it's really important to jump on this as soon as it's available. I mean, so I would sit there right, it's 1500 UTC, I would be pushing the bottom. Because there is a lot of material here. It's very rich. It's very in depth. So I think it's critical to really get at it quick. And then if you've got issues, then you can jump on the discussion board. And that's where your peers can help out, where the community teaching assistants were more than happy to help out. But I think it's critical to get a jump on it. Where we have problems is when you wait till the last minute and the homework is due the next morning. So I think you got to get to it really fast. Yeah, definitely. And Dipty, how was your experience in going through the material? So I think every Wednesday this material was launched. I had to first print out everything. And then I just skimmed through all that on my way back from work on Wednesdays. And then Thursday, Friday, Saturday were my days. I had two kids. So I didn't really have the luxury to just work and study all evening. I had to wake up in the morning before my kids woke up. I just spent two hours a day to just listen to the video into X. And then when I skimmed through the material once, when the video was played, I could actually follow along much easier. And then I would solve the practice problem. So by Saturday, I would actually finish all the material. And Sunday, when the kid snapped, was my time to finish the test. So in that regard, I have Vishnan, for example, asking if it is unrealistic to pursue two courses in parallel. What's your take on that? I never did that. So I think if somebody has the time, I think it's reasonable because you start on Wednesday if you finish it. If you put in that time and you're serious about it, you put in that grip and discipline to do it. And I think it's reasonable that by Saturday you can finish that poll. Of course, there are weeks when you need to put in 15 hours, one difficult week. But on average, I would say if you work smartly, you could put in like seven hours and you should be fine. And then if someone wants to do two courses, sure, if they have the time. I personally, along with work and family and kids, I don't think I've done two courses. So maybe that's also a cool thing to look at our poll right now because our students have, I think a pretty good feeling already of how much they should put in, right? So the majority says either seven to eight hours a week or nine to 10 hours a week. And would you agree with that? Is it reasonable to do that? Yeah, I think that's fairly reasonable to do that. Again, front load at the beginning of the week, that's probably about what I would put in there. But remember, if you're trying to do two a week, kind of go back to the last question. We had some people that were trying that previously and it's an extreme challenge. So just a little caution there. But yeah, that seems reasonable to me. And there are also weeks where there's probably some content that you are familiar with because you have experience in that particular function at your workplace, in which case that particular week might be a life week for you. But there are also weeks where it's completely new and you're looking at it for the first time and you need to actually listen to it a couple of times and two X and one X and like a few times before it sinks in. So those are the weeks where you'd be spending 14 hours. Yes, there will be such weeks. Yeah, I think another thing to point out here with SC0X, there's a lot of software that's involved in there. Now that you have to be an expert, but in software, if you're like most people, you got to get into the models, you got to play with them, you've got to understand the models and that again, that's a little bit of a steeper learning curve. And we do a great job with the recitations. So the recitations aren't technically required, you won't be graded on the recitation, but you need to watch the recitation when you're learning the software. Learning that sooner rather than later is going to really, really help in your homework. So that's another thing I would suggest learning. Get in that software real fast. And I would also recommend that when you're doing these courses, like if you're printing it out, make all the notes you need to on that. So when you're preparing for your final exam, it's like a cheat sheet that you have that you can quickly revise, like do your tests, your comprehensive final and everything well. I still have it, I use it for classes. Very good. Excellent, excellent. Okay, so in addition to the videos, the quick question, practice rolling and recitations, we also introduced more recently the sandbox. What is that? These are interactive problems. These are problems that we create just to provide a little bit of fun during this journey. Is just for instance, a linear programming model that you can modify a parameter in the objective function or you can modify the value of the constraint and see the effect of this change in the solution of the problem. So it's just to provide you another way to fix concept and to play with these concepts. So I really encourage you to go through the sandbox section in order to play a little bit and have some fun with these problems, why not? So to Jeff, or did you use other materials outside our courses too? I have a question from Gonzalo who asked, can you recommend other books or other resources? So did you do that? We recommend sandbox too, right? Yeah, so some chapters had some links at the end. Sometimes when I had the time and I finished it early on, I would actually go and see what's in that. But that's not something I did on a weekly basis, but I would say like 25 to 40% of the time I would go and at least like see what's in there. I didn't really have the time to like read everything. And I actually think that's one of the benefits of being verified and I would highly recommend everyone be verified because you've got skin in the game, you're gonna do a lot better. But the access to the supplemental materials, you're looking to add richness, that's the place to do it. So that's what I would recommend if you're looking for additional materials, I mean, it's there just for verified students. And this is the intention, it's just to provide additional material. So the basic, the core material is in the videos, quick question and practice problem. With that, you should be able to complete and pass the great assignment. But for those that want to go further, this section helped to do that. And also the reference material that we always include in the key concept documents. So this also is just to provide more sources to go deeper. In terms of the things that from our point of view, with this experience of teaching online, we think that the instantaneous feedback that you get when you are completing a quick question or practice problem from the learning perspective is very powerful. And it's something that our learners really appreciate to have because you can try one, two, three times. And after that, you have the solution and also the explanation of this solution. So if you are struggling with any concept, we think that this might help. You always have also the forums, the forums to go there, to ask any question you have, any concern you want to share related to this video's quick question or practice problem. There are different kinds of problems that we are providing from new medical problems, multiple choice checkbox, and also this drag and drop or a picture where you need to find the gantry claims in this port that is a more fun problem and these things. Yeah. So perhaps you can comment also on how you use the forums for your learning, if you did. So yeah, so I think there were some weeks. It was, I see one X was the first one that I did where I was struggling with, I think it was both a question. I don't have the question to the same if something has changed, but I was like struggling and struggling. Like, let me go and see what's happening in the discussion forum and that's really helpful. By then they're like, to any other people who have already struggled and I've come up with some way to do it. So when you read that, I'm like, oh man, I said, Jeff was earlier, why didn't I do it? So that's when I learned that when I'm like really struggling with something, then that's the time when I used to actually go and see what was happening in the discussion forum to actually help myself out of that practice problem and learn positive, Jeff. Yeah, and even if you're not having problems, sometimes keeping up with the discussion forum is great because sometimes you don't know what you don't know and something in the discussion forum will spark just a new learning. So I'd highly recommend staying active, participating, checking forums out as you can because there's a lot of good information. The beautiful thing about the CTR, the community is that you've got experts that you don't know about. I mean, there's 20,000 people probably online. So for any given topic, there's probably someone online that is an expert at that and they will provide some really interesting feedback or some of a different way to look at things. So you can learn from your fellow classmates as well. Yeah, all of us, we are learning from the peers because we have a very rich community of people with experience in supply chain management. Sometimes they are bringing their own concerns with the day-to-day problems that they need to face. This also reach a lot, the knowledge in this discussion forum. Also, I want to highlight it here, the amazing job that the community teaching assistant are doing during the discussion forum. Jeff has been a community teaching assistant with us for the, since the beginning, I can say, when we started, he can tell also about how these people are contributing to the program and also the amount of positive energy that they are injecting, trying to help motivate the learners to be there, being helpful, trying to help them to solve the problem. But I always tell them, don't provide the solution. I just want, because the learning process, you need to be struggling and you need to find the solution yourself. But I think the community teaching assistant really do a great job and create this nice learning environment in the discussion forum. One question that directly feeds into that is the question about software. So we already discussed a little bit about the fact that we are applying software in SC0X. It's a necessary necessity to deal with software. And Kavita asks, well, here she, I don't know, is she okay, is not very familiar with software and she hasn't done a lot of work in that regard. So how would you approach that if you're new to using mathematical software? What's a clever way to do that? You gotta jump on it early. I mean, so they're not throwing you in over your heads, right? So the software, it's there. It's easy to use. You just have to start learning it early. You have to play with it to understand it. Again, it's not the same thing you wait for the last minute, but you don't have to be an expert. I mean, I wasn't an expert in any logic simulation. And so, yeah, that's something you want. I think to add to what Jeff said, I think keep an open mind. I had zero software background before I started MicroMasters. I was very good at Excel, but that was it. That was my start and end to software. So SCZRx really helped me to relance my skills to a new level. And I think the most important thing there is to not be afraid of a software, but just go with an open mind and the expectations are actually very helpful. Really help you literally hold your hand and like walk you through step by step. So you will not get lost. And even if you get lost, you can actually reach out to the whole community. There's someone who's there to help you out. So go with an open mind. Yeah, and I wanted to add that this design for those that never been familiar with this software. So we're not a software. So you need to be on the citation army sign to go with step by step in order to allow you to be familiar after there. Yeah, because the goal isn't to make you experts in annual logic or SAS on your program, it's to make you understand the concepts. And that's the software is already guide you through the concepts. And that's the core learning that we bring forth. Yeah, to have you ready to apply this concept to solve real problems in supply chain matter. So this is the main goal here. So life events, this is something that we... This is a great example of a life event. There are scheduled two more life events during SCC-DOX. Do you want Alex to comment something about that? Yeah, so we have two life events scheduled for our verified learners. One is going to happen somewhere in week five. We have yet to determine the exact date. And our intention there is to invite some expert from the field and discuss with him how he applies the techniques that we have taken a look at in week one through four in his everyday business so that you get a good idea that what we're teaching is not a theoretical concept, but it's absolutely applied. We're using that every day. That's the second life event that we are doing. And the third life event is going to be in week 11. And we are probably doing problems from practice. So we are going to collect your ideas and your problems that you're facing every day and use the concept that we learned in the last eight weeks and give you an idea of how we can use these to solve specific problems and discuss them probably with Chris. So yeah, if you have proposals, do not hesitate to send to the course lead and the team. Absolutely. And we will evaluate them. And finally, we will choose some variety of notes. A nice mix. Excellent. And then the experience of our learners. So what we did here is just to bring Jeff and Dipty to share with you this experience. So I want you now to share with them some hints, some recommendations. So Dipty, you combine your family, your youth and the five SCX courses plus the CFX. So which recommendation would you share with these new learners? I think first thing you have to go do it with your passion, be passionate about what you're doing it and make sure that you communicate that you're passionate about this to the people around you, your family, your manager, whoever that you're interacting with. And that's what I did. My manager was very supportive. My spouse was very supportive. And that's one of the big things that I had. So I used to actually wake up every morning and like study for two hours. I spoke to my manager, I used to have to use my lunchtime to do my study at work and that really helped me to like get everything going really fast. And I would say that the biggest thing that I got from MicroMasters where they was Etsy2x when I actually did that, I built a scrappy network strategy model just out of Etsy2x. And I showed it to the CEO that I used to report to. He was very impressed. And that eventually went on to be my biggest gig, the most strategic ops project in the whole business and that got me a big jump in my career. So it's like completely paid for every single minute that I put into it and every single dollar that I got. Thank you, Dipty. And what about you? Yes, because you also have family, you are a professional in supply chain management. So you also need to manage all of these things. Yeah, it's about prioritization and installing the right type of discipline to making sure like I said, when 1500 UTC comes, man, you're jumping on the newly released material, you're learning it right away. Also find places where you can connect it to work. Okay, because this is all about applying and solving problems in supply chain management. So if you can see things where you tie it together, like Dipty said, if you can bring that into your job, for me, I teach. So I'm an instructor for Apex and for IVF, I was able to bring that into my teaching. Sometimes I do workshops, I'm able to bring these concepts into the workshops that I teach. So for me, it's about looking for where I can tie this in. In fact, just this week and there was an operation simulation competition that we ran. So it's MIT and global graduate students around the world and we leveraged SC0X. It was like, well, we got a distribution. So we learned from like week seven what the distribution was and we put it into a simulation model and put it into an LP. And yeah, this stuff's real life. You learn to apply it. So by putting those hooks into, this is how I can apply it. My real world app really drives you. And I think that's very important, right? Like because of online learning, you're learning it and you have an opportunity to immediately go and apply it at work. You don't have to wait until you graduate. So definitely make use of it. Excellent, excellent. So yes, in terms of community, we have spontaneous study groups, meeting groups in different cities, in different countries, in different continents, which is great. We also have the fresh connection experience. Fresh connection is one of the simulation games that we are offering in SC4X, supply chain technology and system. The fifth course as part of the MicroMaster program is a simulation game supply chain. So we offer as a tool that you can play with and apply all of the concept that you have learned in the five courses in this simulation game. We try to simulate a real company and you need to make decisions always straight off between costs, typically between costs and service in the supply chain. So last year, I'm very proud of the SCX learners because they went to the global competition. This is a competition all over the world. You need to have a highest score in the game in order to be part of this competition. They met for the very first time in Lisbon, the group of these four people and they won the prize. So this was really, really nice to see how this blended education, this first online part plus the in-person connection and the in-person work works in order to do that. Jeff, recently you just came back from the competition. And you shared that you have experience. Yeah, like I said, we used the stuff we learned in SC0X and we scored 17 out of 167. So top graduate schools around the world applying this and we were like 3% off the leader. So, and the leader was MIT, by the way, we got the number one, number three spots. So this is a great place to come for grad school too. But yeah, it was a fantastic experience. I think you see a lot of strong people with simulation that these types of competitions are, yeah, I'd highly recommend Fresh Connection. Excellent, excellent. So I think now it's time for your questions. Let us know which questions you have for us, for Jeff, for DT. We will be very happy to answer any questions that you might have. So we have answered already quite a bunch while we're talking. So perhaps we go back quickly to the admissions to the blended program. Here's a question about if you're not having a strong academic background, what are the chances of getting admission to the blended program if you're doing all program here? So to apply for the blended program, you need to have the micro master credential, also bachelor degree. So it's just a way of apply of that in terms of the criteria. We take into consideration same thing, exactly the same thing as we take into consideration for the traditional 10 months supply chain management program. The main difference is we are not asking for GRE or GMAT because we are just looking to your performance in the micro master credential. So this is something that you don't need to have. And then in addition to that, you need to provide every single thing, your transcripts for your previous background, your performance in the micro master program, your essay, your proposal for the capstone project, a media statement, and we take all of these things into consideration and based on that, the committee make the decision. I need to say that I have been part of the selection committees for 10 years. Last year when I was part of the committee, selection committee for the blended program was the hardest time I had. All of the applicants I reviewed, I was at mid now. It was outstanding. So it was very tough to have this cohort of 40 outstanding students because the quality of the people that apply was really, really high. But having said that, those that complete the micro master, you demonstrate a lot of great and you demonstrate a lot of knowledge at the end of the journey. So I really encourage you to try and see because it's a combination of different things. I also see that we have a couple of questions that go towards math background and supply chain management background. So there are variations of how much proficiency in math do I actually have to do to successfully go through. I think they already saw that we are going to be a little bit more formal in that course. And also how much proficiency do I, or previous experience, do I need in supply chain management? So what do you think on that? I would think that the course actually teaches you all the math that you need to be able to perform well. However, if you do have a math background, you would probably be finishing those weeks faster. That's all I would say. And supply chain background, again, zero knowledge to supply chain, very little math background can still come on, pick up everything, learn everything every week and perform very well. So that shouldn't be a deterrent tool to apply and do the program well. Yeah. And I need to say that we have a student, a lot of students have SP in supply chain management. We have also a student that comes from other fields, from marketing, from finance, from other fields that they say, hey, I want to learn about supply chain management. And the program is designed to provide these foundations and basic concepts since the very beginning. And online education is also very pedagogical and need to be very straightforward and step by step. So I think for that online education is a good way to jump in a new field. I'll learn about that. The other topic that comes back is career opportunities. So I think he already posted that directly in the beginning and there was another, yeah, Oma also asked about job opportunities afterwards. So how it really improved their careers in moving forward. Right? And I think you already commented on that a little bit, right? Absolutely. So just the SC2X and like some of the things that I did, I did network strategy for the first time in my life that zero support from anyone in my office to start with. I learned everything through SC2X. I took it and I showed it to a few people and then it became a project where I involved a lot of people to get a lot of input. But the main background came from here. And same with analytics. I did SQL and I did a lot of analytics at work and all the background for that came from whatever I learned in SC0X and SC4X. So I think it really helps you transform and like up your skills, up your figure a lot through the MicroMasters, Jeff. Yeah, I would agree. So I've already been in the field for a while. So I, like I said, I do the certification teaching. I'm an independent consultant. So what it really helped me do is to kind of up my game a little bit. So for me, it was kind of an adder. Maybe open up a few more doors for me. Yeah. And after this event, we can share with you two testimonials from Will Jones and Mia. These are good examples of people that just earn a job in supply chain management because of the MicroMasters. And I'm also happy to announce that companies are also sending their employees but are also offering job opportunities to MicroMasters holders. GE is offering this opportunity now for Massachusetts residents. Also, there are more companies that soon are going to announce a grant job interviews to MicroMasters holders in supply chain management. So I'm happy that more and more companies are joining to this project. For us, the big jump is that we're here now. Yeah. Absolutely, yes. It also helps you make a lot of contacts, right? Like some of the people that I met in MicroMasters actually that I connected over LinkedIn helped me get my resume through the companies that I'm interested in interviewing for. That's also great. That's what we'll have. It is a good network. So any last questions? No, I think we're good. We have covered all the questions. I think it's time to wrap up, right? So we have covered 60 minutes and quite an amount of information here. Thank you very much, Eva, that you took that time to explain all the details. And especially, thank you, Dipti and Jeff, to share with us that information. I think that was really valuable. I'm excited again to work here and do the course again. It's a really cool atmosphere. I like that very much. So thank you very much to our learners who attended and for the lively discussions and participation in the polls. That's great and it's a good indication also for the forums, right? If people are active, I'm looking forward to the discussions in the forums, share with us, answer questions, ask questions, whatever you want to prefer. Yeah. And do not hesitate to share your feedback, your suggestion, any question, any concern you have with the course team, with myself directly. We are always very, very open and happy to receive your feedback and to learn from that and to improve based on that. So thank you so much. Thank you very much for... Best of luck in SCOA. Exactly, thank you very much for choosing the MicroMasters program and SCOAX. And we're looking forward to interacting with you and seeing you in the forums. Excellent, thank you. Thanks. Bye.