System Dynamics Modeling and Analysis

GEO-SD 662

Image GEO-SD662.jpg

This course is likely to change the way you think about the world you live in. When a problem occurs, we typically start looking for a single and dominant cause. In contrast, in this course you learn to look for the network of causes and effects that create change over time, may changes be good or problematic. Once you have captured the cause and effect relationships in a simulation model, you have a tool to explore and understand change. With this tool and knowledge, you can find policies that have desirable effects and that do not produce unintended, undesirable effects. You will also learn how cause and effect networks complicate decision-making and lead to mismanagement. With this knowledge you will become a person that can ask and answer important questions at the right time. This is needed because as Albert Einstein stated: the problems of today must be solved with a higher level of thinking than that which led to the problems in the first place.

United Nations' sustainable development goal SDG no. 16 highlights the importance of good governance. Consistently, several branches of UN as well as the EU and the OECD call for systems thinking to solve new and old problems caused by population and economic growth combined with resource scarcity. Accordingly, many cases in this course deal with sustainability.

The MOOC gives a thorough introduction to the problem oriented and interdisciplinary method of System Dynamics (SD). SD extends the field of systems thinking with modeling and analysis such that one can explore how "everything influences everything" without making logical errors. You learn to test your hypothesis for why problems occur, and to test the effectiveness of policy proposals. You have free access to the simulation program Stella Online. The course is accredited by the University of Bergen and the in-house version of this MOOC is central in the Univesity's Masters Program in System Dynamics, which has a focus on sustainability transformation. Previous students rank the course as very interesting and they find it to be of higher quality than most other courses they have taken.

The course makes use of a pedagogy that has proven to lead to more and deeper learning than reading, lectures, and watching videos. True learning requires effort on your part to create the needed connections in your mind that enable you to later make use of what you learn. By making quizzes an integral part of the course, the effort becomes more enjoyable. This is particularly the case if you are able to study together with others and organize "quiz sessions". You can do this over the Internet using the social media you are familiar with.

While the word MODEL denotes a simplified representation of something real, you may also think of the word MODEL as an abbreviation for: Make Onerous Decisions Easier Later. This means that effort spent on model building and analysis will make it easier to make decisions later. When successful, the prize you win is satisfaction.

The name of the field and method, System Dynamics, may sound a bit foreign. To see if you understand these two words as they are understood in the field of SD, click on system and then on dynamics. Hopefully, the comments you get will help you stay clear of unintended interpretations of these two central words.

Below you see an example model in the simulation program Stella. Notice the basic logic of dynamic systems: a flow of births adds to the current population, while a flow of deaths subtracts from the population. Reinforcing feedback is illustrated by the fact that the births that add to the population, increase with the size of the population. Balancing feedback is illustrated by the fact that the deaths that subtract from the population, increase with the size of the population. This model gives rise to the simulated, exponential population growth shown in the time-graph to the right.

Home picture.png

If needed, you can take a look at the official course information here.

START COURSE