Santa Fe Institute Courses

The Santa Fe Institute is a very cool thing in the broader applied mathematics world. It started out with 'chaos theory' in the 1990's and their thing these days seems to be 'complex adaptive systems'. It has a pretty high profile. You hear about it a lot in fields like evolutionary biology.

https://www.santafe.edu/

https://www.santafe.edu/research/projects

https://phys.org/partners/santa-fe-institute/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Fe_Institute

The occasion for this post is that I just noticed that they offer DL classes.

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/

Many of their offerings seem to be MOOCs. Some look like taught DL courses that have teachers. They vary from semester course type things to little short courses. Most of it appears to be free.

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/about/faq

There's even an online masters degree in the works. The Santa Fe Institute doesn't award degrees, so this will be offered jointly with Arizona State University which will award the degree. It will be offered through Arizona State's online portal. Teachers will come from both institutions. They are still working on the curriculum and it's due to roll out early in 2019. They say that when it's up and running smoothly, they will repackage some of its lectures and materials in the form of non-credit MOOCs.

The degree program isn't going to be cheap, about $39,000. But the Santa Fe Institute is a high-profile place (and ASU is a major Pac-12 research university) so it might be about as close as DL comes to a prestige degree.

https://www.complexityexplorer.org/about/sfi-and-asu-master-s-degree

 

Great find. This might be an example of innovation in higher ed that we hear about occasionally.