 Hello global supply trainers and welcome to our first live event in SC0H supply chain analytics. My name is Imma Borrella, I'm from Spain. I am a postdoctoral associate here at MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics and I will be the course lead of SC0H. I'm really excited to be here coordinating this first course of the MicroMathology Supply Chain Management and we have a great group. We have more than 26,000 students already enrolled. So I guess it will be a great course together. My goal is to create a great learning experience for all of you and in order to do so I have a Tika who is our teaching assistant here at MIT and I also have a great team of community teaching assistants from all over the world. So we're here behind the screen to help you learn and have a great, great experience in this SC0H course. So today I'm here with Eva Ponte, she is the executive director of the MITx MicroMasters Credential in Supply Chain Management and welcome Eva, thanks for being here. Thank you and welcome global supply trainers, it's my pleasure to be here today. So during this live event we will talk about the MicroMasters Credential in Supply Chain Management so you could learn a little more about the program and we will also talk about this specific course, the first one of the MicroMasters that is SC0X. So should we begin? Excellent. So let's start with a brief introduction to the course and to the program. I want to introduce you to the MicroMasters Credential, provide you some information about the program and some logistics about the course. So first of all, as we both mentioned, welcome global supply trainers to SC0X Supply Chain Analytics and welcome to this huge community. You are now part of the MicroMasters community and we already have more than 200,000 learners enrolled in the MicroMasters program so far. We have started with the first massive online course in 2014 and since then, as I mentioned more than 200,000 students enrolled in any of our SCX courses. More than 13,000 learners are verified. As you might know now we have two kinds of students or two tracks. You can be an audit student, so audit students are those that enroll in the course and they have access to the majority of the material and we have also verified the students. These are the students that are pursuing for a certificate in our course. So more than 13,000 learners verified in any of SCX courses and this is a global program. This means that we have a student from more than 190 countries and this is something that I personally am fascinated about that because it's really great to have the opportunity to reach learners from all over the world. These learners also bring their experience to our courses and it's great to have this diversity in this community. So we already have the first MicroMaster course. This happened last June 2017 and we issued 622 certificates for the MicroMaster Convention. These are the students that have already completed the five courses plus the comprehensive final exam. So let's have a look now today. I just want to introduce you the big picture, what is the MicroMaster program. After that we are going to deep a little bit in SCX supply chain analytics, the course that you have already enrolled in. We want to cover some of the course logistics. I really want to mention you about the discussion forum that is a great tool to collaborate with your peers. We also want to let you know about the life events and the opportunities to join these events and some logistics about how to become a verified student. And definitely we will be at the end of this brief introduction open to answer your questions. So any questions or concerns you may have, please let us know and we will try our best. After this brief introduction we want you to join the breakout sessions. This is a nice tool that this unhung out event offered to our learners. So you will have the opportunity to join a room with eight, nine more peers. See your peers and be seen by your colleagues. So it's a great opportunity to introduce yourself and to chat a little bit about why you joined SCX and your motivation about the program. So at the end of the session, as always, you can come back to the lobby and include your any question or any suggestion or anything you want us to discuss with you during this event. So this is the plan for today. Let's start with the MicroMaster. So the MicroMaster is a program that was announced by President Rave, Rafael Rave, in fall 2015. So this is a program that anyone from anywhere can join. They just need to have a computer and internet connectivity. And one of the principles behind the program is to democratize knowledge. It's just to offer these courses to anyone from anywhere. So the MicroMaster program includes five massive open online courses. These cover basics and the foundation of the supply chain management. We go through supply chain analytics, supply chain fundamentals, supply chain design, and then we move to supply chain dynamics and supply chain technology and system. After completing and pass the five courses, then you need to pass a comprehensive final exam. This is a proper exam at the end of the program and after completing and pass this exam, you will earn the MicroMaster credential in supply chain management. So this is essentially the program. In terms of the contents that we cover in the five courses, we started with this course with SC0X, supply chain analytics. As I mentioned the first course, we include here math, we need these analytic tools in order to teach you how to formulate models, both deterministic and stochastic model. The main purpose is to teach you how to formulate this model, but also how to analyze and how to use this model in order to make decisions in supply chain. At the end, we need math, yes, at the beginning of the MicroMaster, you will find some math that we need in order to help you to make decisions in the supply chain. So then we move to supply chain fundamentals. In this course, we cover the basic tradeoffs in demand forecasting, inventory management and also transportation planning. In supply chain design, we cover here and we try to integrate the three main flows in a supply chain, materials, information and monetary flows. So we will go through the network design problems and we also have a gene rise trying to help you to translate all of the performance and the main impact in the supply chain in the language of the officer, the finance office guide in order to understand how the decisions in the supply chain are going to impact the profitability of the company and the cost, the benefits at the end, the performance of the supply chain. So these first three courses cover mainly the conceptual model and more conceptual. Then we move a little bit to the real life and we add some complexity to these courses. We move to supply chain dynamics. In supply chain dynamics, we cover basic concepts in supply chain dynamics and we also add sources of complexity in supply chains and in the last course, the fifth course, supply chain technology and system, we want you to deal with big data. We will provide some basic tools and basic principles in order to manage big data sets and also we will move to those solutions like the enterprise resource planning solutions and transportation and warehouse management system in order to help you to manage information flows in a supply chain. So with these five courses, the idea is to provide the basic tools, analytic tools and the basic foundations in order to give you the tools that you need in order to apply to real problems, in order to solve industry problems and to make decisions and try to have a more efficient supply chain at the end. So this is the big picture of the MicroMasters. In terms of our learners, why our learners are taking this MicroMasters program, there are different reasons. Most of our learners, they take and they join this program because they want to promote in their current job or they just want to apply for a job in supply chain management. So most of them or a majority of these learners take this program because of our professional career development. We also have learners from companies, companies are sending these learners in order to, as a part of their staff development program in order to develop data skills in particular in supply chain management. There is also a third reason here that the MicroMaster credential is the first part in order to apply to a master degree at MIT. So we are offering currently, we offer the supply chain management residential program. This is a 10 month residential program. Those learners that complete the MicroMaster credential, after earning the credential, they can apply to the blended program. The blended program is the second part of this online program, is the on campus part of the program. It's a five month residential program. So the learners just need to spend one full semester at MIT instead of two full semesters in order to earn a master degree in supply chain management. So this is another reason that some of our learners are taking this MicroMaster program. So let's move now to SC0X and let's have a close look to this course, supply chain analytics. So supply chain analytics, as I mentioned, decision making is one of the core parts of supply chain management. We love analytical models, we love math and we also think that they are really useful in order to help supply chain managers to make decisions in this context. So we cover three different tools, kind of tools, type of tools. We start with the descriptive methods and tools that mainly help us understand what has happened, what has happened in the past. Then we also will teach in SC0X predictive tools. Those tools that will help you to understand what could happen in the future. If this happened in the past, with this information that they have, what could happen in the future just to foresee the future in terms of demand management for instance. We also cover at the end of the course prescriptive, what we call the prescriptive tools that are those tools that will help us to decide what should we do if this is the scenario that we have. So these are the three main things that we are going to cover. And as I mentioned, it's a model-based mathematically oriented course, but our objective is to educate drivers, no mechanics. So we want really to educate those drivers and prepare you to make decisions in supply chain management. So in terms of the contents, the first part of the course, we will cover deterministic models. We will go through basic functions and algebra that we need. We also will cover here linear programming model, mixed integer linear programming model and non-linear models. Definitely the algorithms and approximation techniques, specifically for those transportation models that you will review in this course. Then we will move to the statistic block. And here we will cover basic probability and distribution. We will also teach here statistical analysis. We also offer some different options for software. You will be able to use SAS as a software or Excel, a script sheets. We also cover this option because most of the companies are still using a spreadsheet, so you will, at the end of the course, I think you are going to be an expert using Excel and a spreadsheet. We will have also the opportunity to learn SAS and other software that we have with this statistical analysis. We also will cover in one of the weeks of the course, simulation, discrete event simulation models and Monte Carlo. These are the simulation tools that we will review during this course. So this mainly in terms of contents, what you can expect here. In this case, it's math but it's very well explained and we are teaching drivers and the mechanics as Eva explained. So all of you will be able to do this. Yes, I also want to mention that in terms of contents, these courses are similar to the courses that we are teaching here at MIT. In terms of difficulty, in terms of the problems you are going to solve, in terms of the material we are providing. However, these courses are designed specifically for online purpose. This means that these videos and all of the material we are providing through the platform are designed for this online learning experience. So try to make your life easier if possible. So let's move now to the course logistics. So as Eva mentioned, so far we have more than 26,000 learners enrolling SC0X. We are so excited about that and we have about 900 verified students. Verified students are those that, as I mentioned at the beginning, one of the principles of this program is to democratize knowledge. The second principle is to also credentialize, to provide a credential in supply chain management. And for this, definitely there is some administrative costs associated to the credential. That's why there is a fee. In this case, it's $150 to earn a certificate in this course. And these students, verified students, are those students that pay for, in order to earn this credential in SC0X. We have a student from more than 170 countries. The countries that are most, we have more students from USA. We have 20% of our students, our learners are from the United States, around 20% from India. And then we have 4% from Canada, Mexico, Brazil. We have also Germany, France, and Spain following these countries. We also have in this course, I was surprised, more than around 500 learners from Indonesia and also from Australia. So as you can see, it's a global program and you will find learners from almost all over the world. In terms of the two different tracks that we have, audit the student. Everyone is now audit the student because once you enroll in the course, you are an audit student. Those of you that already upgrade your status, pay $150 and verify your identity are those students that we call verified students. These are the students that are part of the MicroMasters course. So there is a deadline to be a verified student. To upgrade your status, the deadline is October 11th. October 11th is a deadline to update your status to be a verified student. However, my recommendation, if you want to pursue for a certificate in SC0X or you want to pursue for a MicroMaster credential, it is a must to be verified. So if this is your case, I highly encourage you to verify as soon as possible because you need to go through the process. Sometimes there are some issues with the payments, sometimes there are some issues with the ID verification, so the sooner the better if this is your decision. If you just want to join the course because you want to have access to the material, but you are not interested in the certificate, then you don't have the necessity to become a verified student. Having the certificate is also great if they want to show that they passed this course anywhere because it can be also part of your CV. So it's also a great way of certifying that they passed the course because if they are not verified, they won't get the certificate. Yes, that's true. Only verified students are the ones that are going to earn a certificate in this course. So if this is the case, we highly encourage you to verify as soon as possible and fix this. In addition to that, you will have access to some extra material that I will go through. So in order to become a verified student, the first step is to pay $150. We are going to change this price by January 2018. So by January 2018, all of our SCX courses are going to cost $200 per course. However, from now to the end of December, we will still offer these courses for $150. So the first step is to pay. So it's just to click on this green button, Upgrade. And once you go through this green button, you will see the screen that you need to go through the select payment method in order to pay for this $150. Maybe you can explain that the price per course will raise to $200, but the price for the final exam will be lower. It will be $200, and right now it's $600. So at the end, the total amount for the whole MicroMasters credential will be lower. This is a great point, Inba, and this is totally right. Yes, the total cost of the MicroMasters credential is going to be lower than before because it's going to be $1,200. The five courses plus the CFX, however per course is $200, and as you mentioned, the CFX is going to cost much less than before. So yeah, great point. The second step is the ID verification. So after completing the payment, I highly recommend you to go immediately to ID verify yourself. Because to be verified still, you need the two parts of the process. It's not only to pay, it's to verify your identity. To do that, you need to have a webcam, and you need to take a picture using your webcam. And you also need to show an ID government card that includes your picture plus your full name, official name. So this is a process that does not take too long. If you have any issue here, you should contact directly with 2Edex because this process relies completely on Edex. So any issue here, please send an email directly to Edex through the info at Edex email account, or just clicking on the support button that you have on the left side of your screen, always once you are in the Edex course. So the benefits. The benefits for being verified learners is first, as we mentioned, is to earn the certificate. In order to have a certificate in SC0X, the only way is to be a verified student. Second reason is the micro master credential. Only those that pass the five courses as a verified learners are the ones that can earn the micro master credential. And what I need to say here is this is something that we cannot do at the end of the course. Sometimes we receive some emails like, hey, I completed the course, I love it, I did all the assignments, and now I really want to become a verified student in order to earn the credential. Unfortunately, this is something that has a deadline. The deadline is October 11th. So after this point, there is no way to become a verified student in this specific course. If you want to do after that, then you need to wait to the second round of SC0X, and upgrade your status during the first weeks of the course. So there is a deadline to do that. And one of the benefits is access to this life event. This is something extra, it's like an extra service that we will provide for the verified learners. And also we have a section in the course that is called supplemental material for micro master students. So let's say that the core material, the videos, the practice problem are available for anyone enrolling the course. The extra material is not needed in order to pass the grade assignment, but is some extra readings, selecting readings, some of the master pieces that we have conducted here at MIT, that extra problems that can add additional material in a certain topic. So this is what we are providing to the micro master students. In terms of the course and the contents, at this point I think that you are already familiar with some of the videos and also with the director of the program that is Krista, please. And Krista is also the main instructor for this SC0X course. So you will be at the end of the course very familiar with Krista and also Krista's voice. So in terms of the content of the course, we have two different spaces, the learning space. The learning space includes all of the videos, the quick questions. The quick questions are these questions that we just provide after the five, seven minutes video just to fix a certain concept. We cover a concept, a formula, some part in the video and we want to ask you some questions that help you to fix this concept. So after watching the videos and the quick questions, we always provide practice problems. Practice rolling is a way that is just to apply the concept that we review in this lesson in realistic problems. It's a simplification of the reality for sure, but trying to be applied very industrially oriented problems. So this is what we call the learning space, the videos, the quick questions and the practice problems. In addition to that, once you complete all of these, we always provide great assignment at the end of each week. So great assignment is a way just to test your knowledge and just to review the concept and you go through the great assignment in order to see if you have understanding basic concepts. Then in week five, in week six, we offer the midterm exam and at the end of the course, we offer the final exam. So there are one meter, one final, that is the pure assessment part of this course in order to test your knowledge before giving you the certificate. This is the purpose of this midterm and final exam. So any questions that you have related to the learning space, we encourage you to use the discussion forum. The discussion forum is a great tool. You can post there your question, you can answer and help your peers to understand a certain problem, a certain question. So is this space you have to collaborate with your peers? We are very open to that. We really encourage you to use the discussion forum. I'm very happy when I go through the forum and find this great discussion about the certain topic, people providing additional resources, the interpretation of the program and these things. And it's really, really a great environment. I think all of us, we learn a lot from the discussions that are generated in these forums. Yeah, so maybe about the forum, just to complement a little bit. Usually our new students just think about the forum as a way to ask questions about things they didn't understand. But it would be great if you could go in and also try to answer the questions of other students, other students post some questions, you can try to solve that. Don't be shy, don't be scared. It's a really nice environment. It's for learning a learning space. Just go in and try to add something to the discussion. Not only post a question and wait for someone to answer, because we really want the community to help each other. So we encourage you to go in and contribute to the discussions. And a very important point, I will be repeating this again in the course notifications. Yes, when you have a question post, select the question post. And when it's a discussion, a comment, just select the discussion post. There are two different cases. So yes, select question, if it's a question or discussion, when it's a discussion. Yeah, and the reason is because we prioritize questions versus discussion. So our teaching assistant and community teaching assistant go first through the question in order to be sure that all learners have an answer to the question. We understand that discussion is something nice to have. And you can answer that, but it's not our priority in order to solve a specific question that you are starting a problem or something like that. So yeah. Yeah, and also to improve the use of the forum, just please put your questions or discussions in the other place. So your question is related to practice problem one in week one. Just post your question there in that discussion forum because that helps us and your peer learners to understand what this question is related to. And just read the other post before posting a new question because chances are that all that question has been already posted by a fellow learner and it's a discussion going on about it. And you can contribute to that instead of beginning a new thread. So yes, I encourage you to use the discussion forum. It's a great, great tool. It's a great space. And so you will make a most out of it. Yeah, I also learned from the first micromaster core. I was interviewing some of the learners and I learned that when they discovered the discussion forum that was after some weeks after the course was launched, they see these as a resource, as a way to, hey, let's see if another learner already asked this question. And they use as a resource in order to double check the questions and find some solutions there. So, and yes, to have this organized is especially in a massive course with thousands of students help all of us to find the right answer to the right questions. Yeah, so, yeah, sure. Before going to the assessment space, we have a question from one of our learners. Yeah, Shargo El is asking us if the material shared via videos is sufficient for passing the course with high grade or books mentioned in the concept docs are necessary. Well, the videos are enough. Like if you follow the videos, like do all the quick questions and practice problems, you should be able to pass the course with no problem. But of course, the additional books and references we provide can help you to deepen in some concepts or better understand some parts of the course if they're not clear enough to you. So we encourage you to use these references, but they are not needed. Yeah, I would say that the videos and the practice problem are really helpful in order to review the concept and to apply the concept before going to the data assignments. These extra material key concept, some of our learners found very useful to have this key concept document because they really prefer to read these kind of documents instead of a study based on the slides. So I would say that we are providing these materials that based on the past courses and the feedback we receive from learners were helpful for our learners. The books is like the sources. We have some of the sources because in each lesson you will see that it's not just a unique source. There is not one book reference book for the whole micro master or for even for one specific week. So we use different sources and we always want to share with you the sources we are using. Just in case you want to go deeper to the concept or sometimes because you need to do more, a little bit more information in order to understand better the content. But in general, the videos plus the practice problem and the question should be enough in order to complete and pass the data assignment and the midterm and final exams. Yeah, excellent. So this is regarding the learning space collaboration. We love collaboration there. Assessment. Assessment is something that we need to assess the individual knowledge. We are not going to assess the study group knowledge or how you collaborate with your peers in assessment. Assessment is individual. So that's why we don't allow to use the discussion forum for any question related to assessment. For this purpose, we encourage you to use the email account as in this case is sc0xhelpatmit.edu. And this is the help support email account that we have our teaching assistants and the staff are monitoring this email account in order to solve any specific question that you may have related to assessment. So please do not post any comment related to assessment for this purpose. Use the email account because as I mentioned, it's an individual work. It's not a work in groups or with others. Any suggestion, any feedback, any idea to improve the course, we are always always happy to receive. We are always happy to review. We always receive positive feedback. We also receive constructive feedback and we learn from this feedback. So this at the end helped us to have a better course. So I would say that the second round of the course, the third round is always better than the first one because the main part of that is because of the feedback we are receiving in order to improve our courses. So any feedback that you have, send it to the sc0x email account, send it to the course lead, send it to me, and we will be very happy to answer this feedback. This is just a question about Daydream Amerindian, what kind of commitment we recommend to give five courses for coming to the final. In terms of effort, all of our courses include eight weeks of content plus one meter plus one final. On average, our learners are spending around eight hours per week. This definitely depends on the week and this also depends on your background. Some learners are very comfortable with the statistical analysis and maybe with four or five hours per week, they are totally fine. Some learners are less comfortable with one specific week and they need to spend around eight hours per week. All of the courses, the learners say, oh, this is the most difficult week for me. Maybe sometimes this means that they need to spend ten hours per week. As I mentioned, all average between six, eight hours per week is the average effort per course. In terms of the whole MicroMaster program, we really recommend you to take the courses in order. That means this is the first one, we recommend you to start with sc0x and then we offer the courses one after the other. So after completing sc0x, you can go through sc1, sc2, sc3, and sc4. On average, this is going to take around less than 18 months to complete the whole MicroMaster program. So this is just a sample of the discussion forum. In this first week, we use mainly to introduce ourselves, we encourage you to introduce you just to know about our learners and you know us. And then you can also see some nice questions about any specific problem or about the revenue explanation or whatever. Yeah, maybe we get comments since it's in the slide. Sure. Just don't flag the post because you like the post. The flags are just for reporting posts that are inappropriate or they shouldn't be there. Yeah. So just if they are related to the assignment, you could report that because that's against the honor code. If they are not polite, you could report that and we will take care of that. But not report a post you like just to keep track of them. For instance, the welcome post that we post there with a nice picture is already reported. I can't believe that. Oh my God, we did wrong here. Okay. So yes, this happened. Some people are confused something that is like, oh, I'm going to a vote or vote for this post and finally they are reporting. The life events. One of the advantage to use this tool is that you can use, we can use this to interact with you and answer your questions. That is something that I think is nice to have. But you can also use this to join to the breakout session. Then this is one of our CTAs and one of our learners. He's talking and discussing with other eight peers in this breakout session about a certain topic. So this is a great opportunity also for you to interact with your peers in this course. This first event is the welcome one. The second one will be a week five and then we will have the third life event that we encourage you to send any problem that you have practiced in a real problem that you want to discuss with us during the life events. Yeah, this is our new idea. We just introduced in our life events and we think it's really interesting to discuss real life problems, problems you're experiencing in your day to day work life. So if you want to share with us some of those problems or some of those challenges, of course they should be related to the issues we are teaching in SCC rights because these are life events in SCC rights. But it will be great if you can share those with us and we can then try to comment all these problems and try to solve them in our coming life events. So yeah, this is all from my side about the presentation and this brief introduction and now we will be happy to answer any questions we have. Any other questions? Not so far. So then let's do the following thing. So then let's move to the breakout session now. Join this different breakout session. If any CTAs, community teaching assistants are there, please join a different breakout session and moderate this. So the proposal here is that each of you introduce yourself, your name, your current position, what you are doing now, and a fun fact of you, about yourself. And then we want to know, to learn why you are taking this course, SCC0X, supply chain analytics, and what do you expect from this course and from the micro master program. So let's join the breakout rooms, discuss for 15 minutes, 10 minutes, because we are running a little bit late, discuss for 10 minutes and then come back to the lobby with any questions, comments you have for us. Iman, I will be very happy to answer your questions. Excellent. Thank you. See you in 10 minutes. See you.