"Hi, my name is Scott Page." "I'm a Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science and" "Economics at the University of Michigan." "And I'd like to welcome you to a new version of Model Thinking." "Model Thinking was the first mook offered by the University of Michigan in 2012." "Since that time, more than a half a million people have taken the course." "And so I thought I'd take this opportunity to share with you some of the feedback I've gotten from the students and some of the things that I think have been sort of most interesting about the course and most useful." "So first, one thing that the students have found is, just how practical the course is." "So what the course is going to do is teach you a whole bunch of models, and those models actually get played out in the real world." "So let me show you some examples." "So in the summer of 2014 Ebola was spreading in Africa, and there's a question of how do you model that?" "The Center for Disease Control released to the public an SIR type model, it's actually an SIIR model where it was susceptible infected incubated recovery." "This was one of the models we covered in class." "What is great is I got a lot of emails from students, and there's a lot of discussion among people who've taken the course about how it's so interesting, because they took the model thinking class, they can actually go in and" "work with this model that was issued by Center for Disease Control." "So, real policy in the real the world is being done using the same sorts of models you'll use in this class." "That's also the case that, you know, there's models that we use in this class that are used in ways you've never even imagined." "So, we play with a Markov model." "So, Markov model is where we look at things like transitions to democracy, and transitions out of poverty." "And even whether your relationship is happy." "And what you can find now, on the web." "If you look up, you'll see things like Markov models, or video segmentation." "So one theme in the course that we'll talk about a lot is how, when you learn a model you can apply it in lots of really unexpected places." "In video segmentation of Markov models was one that I personally never anticipated." "Another theme of the course is going to be sort of many models to one, how once you've got a whole set of models you can apply them in lots of places." "Well, in 2014 when the World Cup was going on, people from all over the world are watching soccer, but it's also the case that people from all over the world are taking the models thinking course." "And what was funny seeing all the different ways people are applying models from the course, the Colonel Blotto model, zero sum game models, right the success versus luck model, that we covered in the linear equations course." "Num segment of the course and applying those to the World Cup, so it gets fascinating seeing this sort of many to one approach play out in something that again I didn't really anticipate the World Cup." "And then finally I think one thing that's been most, sort of interesting about how the course has played out is how particular things in the course has really resonated, so one of the ideas we'll talk about in the course is crowd sourcing." "So how is it that you can sort of tap into the wisdom of crowds to solve problems, make predictions, that sort of stuff?" "Well, since 2012 when the course first was introduced, crowdsourcing has really taken off." "And what you'll see if you sort of look into the literature of crowdsourcing, or even sort oft look at investing in companies that do crowdsourcing." "Is you'll see how important models have been in developing these new platforms." "And then last, I just want to, you know, say a big thank you to every who's taken the course." "And also hope that those of you who take the course this time, just really get engaged." "because one of things that's been, I think, most rewarding for me is the tremendous amount of effort that people have put into the course, including doing things like writing graphical representations of everything they've learned, writing long papers on sort of what they've done." "The Australian Military even wrote a 50-page summary of the course that they hand out to new recruits." "So it's just been, a personally very rewarding thing for me to see how much energy, effort, care, concern that people have put in to their own studies." "And how much they've learned by taking this course." "So I hope you have a fabulous time," "I'm looking forward to interacting with you online." "And, enjoy model thinking." "Thank you very much."