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Complex Adaptive Systems Cascading And Disseminating Education and Scientific Ideas
Contact information: Professor Jeffrey Johnson, The Open University, MK7 6AA, UK
jeff.johnson@open.ac.uk.UK
Office +44 1908 652627; Secretary +44 1908 653555; Mobile +44 77 96696621 http://www.etoilecascadesideas.eu
The publishable report shall be formatted to be printed as a stand alone paper document.
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Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................ 3
1. Project Context and Objectives ........................................................................................................... 4
2. Web Portal: Étoile delivery & archives ................................................................................................. 5
2.1 The education modules ............................................................................................................ 5
2.2 The assessment software component ...................................................................................... 6
2.3 Community ................................................................................................................................ 7
2.4 Mobile Devices .......................................................................................................................... 7
3. The Étoile Peer Marking Platform ........................................................................................................ 8
3.1 Decoupling Peer Marking and Course Presentation ................................................................. 9
3.2 Peer Marking for Summer Schools .......................................................................................... 10
3.3 Peer Evaluation for Young Researchers PhD studies .............................................................. 10
4. The UNESCO UniTwin Complex Systems Digital Campus .................................................................... 10
4.1 The CSS Roadmap and the role of Étoile for young complex systems scientists. ....................... 11
4.2 The CS-DC UNESCO UniTwin, its Cooperation Programme and the role of Étoile in its educational ecosystem for a large variety of Curricula ..................................................................... 11
4.3 UniTwin Cooperation Programme between UNESCO and the CS-DC ......................................... 12
4.4 The CS-DC Wikiversity site as revealing the virtuous chain “living roadmap, knowledge map, curricula and courses” ....................................................................................................................... 12
5. Recruiting students to Étoile ............................................................................................................. 14
Organise and motivating students to register and study the courses. ......................................... 14
6. Evaluation of Étoile for education and cascading ideas ...................................................................... 15
6.1 The impact of MOOCs on Étoile .................................................................................................. 16
6.2 Evaluating the Étoile URL Crowd Sourcing Approach ................................................................. 18
6.3 Étoile and communities of learners ............................................................................................ 18
7. Conclusion: Does Étoile work for education? ..................................................................................... 18
Appendix A: List of beneficiaries in the UNESCO UniTwin Complex Systems Digital Campus ................... 19
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The emerging science of complex systems is inherently interdisciplinary. Conventional science focuses on particular areas of study and researches them vertically in great depth. In contrast, the science of complex systems seeks methods to cut horizontally across the conventional silo sciences, integrating them into a new understanding of our increasingly complex world.
Most pressing social, economic, political and environmental problems relate to the interaction of many subsystems. Complex systems scientists must be able to work across the disciplines, but most are trained in just one discipline. Given the breadth of knowledge required to address the wide range of problems faced, almost all of us know almost nothing about almost everything . At doctoral and postdoctoral levels there is a huge educational deficit that must be rectified. In this context
The objective of the Étoile project is to provide high-quality scalable no-cost education for the complex systems community.
To achieve this objective the Étoile project created three integrated elements. The first is an internetbased Étoile Platform to facilitate the production, presentation and assessment of courses. The second is a Peer Marking Platform that addresses the problem of marking and grading very large numbers of students’ work in flexible and scalable ways. The third is the creation of the UNESCO UniTwin
Complex Systems Digital Campus (CS-DC) that already links more than one hundred institutions worldwide - a remarkable achievement that guarantees that the work done on the Étoile project will be applied at a large scale into the long term future. CS-DC will deliver its first Massive Open Online
Course (MOOC) on Global System Science in the Spring of 2015.
This report gives details of these three elements, and how they can be combined to provide high quality mass education through the CS-DC at no cost to learners. The Étoile approach is then evaluated in the light of the many advances that have occurred since it was first conceived. Of these a major change is the emergence of MOOCs and the great impact they will have on education in general. Since the whole spirit of Étoile is mass open online education it could be asked if our project has been overtaken by events. Our conclusion is that Étoile is very well adapted to the changed environment and that the CS-DC is set to be the major source of MOOCs for complex systems science through its combination of platforms, peer marking and an established community able to define the curriculum and set standards for assessment and certification. The original crowd-sourcing concept in
Étoile is fundamental in the context of our community of learners.
In summary, the current Étoile model is very well adapted for the purpose of creating high-quality scalable free education for the international complex systems community; the CS-DC provides the necessary infrastructure for this education to be successfully created and delivered; and this is already operational with the first of many planned MOOCs to be presented in the Spring of 2015.
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The emerging science of complex systems is inherently interdisciplinary. Conventional science focuses on particular areas of study and researches them vertically in great depth. In contrast, the science of complex systems seeks methods to cut horizontally across the conventional silo sciences, integrating them into a new understanding of our increasingly complex world, as illustrated below.
Most pressing social, economic, political and environmental problems relate to the interaction of many subsystems. The most obvious case is climate change where human behaviour is changing the geology and biology of our planet, yet our political system is unable to respond adequately because of economic and social pressures. Another example is the evolution of cities and the emergence of a global ecology of cities within which there apparently insoluble problems such as housing shortages, traffic congestion, pollution, drug addiction, and crime. Complex Systems Science is fundamental to addressing such problems, including avoiding financial crashes and managing epidemics.
Complex systems scientists must be able to work across the disciplines, but most are trained in just one discipline. Given the breadth of knowledge required, almost all of us know almost nothing about almost everything . At doctoral and postdoctoral levels there is a huge educational deficit that must be rectified. In this context
The objective of the Étoile project is to provide high-quality scalable no-cost education for the complex systems community.
Scalable means that the cost of education does not increase with the number of students. In other words, every extra student studying a course costs almost nothing. Traditional education is not scalable, since the number of teachers increases in proportion to the number of students. Scalability can only be achieved by new ways of thinking about education and imaginative use of the Internet.
To achieve our objective we built an internet-based Étoile Platform that facilitates the production, presentation and assessment of courses. Well-designed education makes clear the learning outcomes of a course and establishes ways to assess whether or not the student has achieved the desired learning outcomes. One of the main obstacles to delivering high quality education at no cost to the student is the lack of scalable assessment and feedback. Étoile addresses this by peer marking, where students mark each other’s work with the final score awarded depending on the emerging reputations of the markers. This can give results comparable to marking by experts, and allows searching questions with open-ended answers. Peer marking is perfectly scalable, since every extra student is an extra marker.
During the project the partners created an extensive network structure of universities in Africa and
South America forming an international Complex Systems Digital Campus , CS-DC, as a growing network of institutions sharing educational and research resources in complex systems. More than one hundred university rectors or presidents have signed up to the Digital Campus which is recognised by
UNESCO as a Europe–Africa–Latin America UniTwin 1 . The Étoile teams are also developing strong
CS-DC contacts with China, India, Russia, the USA, Japan, and other countries. This network creates a large community of teachers and learners willing and able to implement the Étoile method.
The over-arching objective of the Étoile project was to provide high-quality scalable no-cost education for the complex systems community, and this objective has been achieved. Through the CS-DC the Étoile method is now operational, with the first of many MOOCs being delivered in the Spring of 2015.
1 http://en.unesco.org/unitwin-unesco-chairs-programme
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The Étoile platform was developed in Lisbon by Jorge Louçã, Rúben Paixão and Rui Lopes da Silva.
Paul Bourgine and Carla Taramasco periodically helped testing the platform, from Paris and several places in South America. Finally, the new web platform was on-line in January 2013, at the address http://www.etoileplatform.net/ , allowing this team to present the platform within the UNESCO
Complex Systems – Digital Campus network, and collaborate for creating the existing modules and bringing together the (now growing) Étoile community.
The Étoile Platform has been implemented in Java, in a safe and robust architecture provided by the open-source Play!
2 Java framework on the Internet. The Play! architecture optimizes CPU and memory consumption, is scalable, and therefore ideal for serving a large community of students 3 . The implementation runs on the Heroku server, also scalable, allowing the access to a wide set of storage, monitoring and analytics tools running in the cloud.
Figure 2.1. The Étoile Platform - available at http://www.etoileplatform.net/
The inclusion of content modules on the platform aims to make it attractive to students, bringing together a community of young researchers around Étoile. This would allow inviting them to contribute to the Étoile ecology, by associating pedagogical resources to the Curriculum in Complex
Systems Sciences.
The actual Étoile modules are the following (situation on the 16 th July, 2014; see the statistics page at http://www.etoileplatform.net/statistics ):
2 http://www.playframework.com
3 Web platforms for large communities of users, such as The Guardian or LinkIn, are built using a similar architecture and the Play! framework.
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Module: Genetic, Immunologic, Metabolic and Social Networks
Jacques Demongeot is presently director of the Laboratory TIMC (CNRS 5525) Techniques of
Imaging, Modelling & Cognition and he is also head of the Institute of Bio-engineering (IFRT
130 IpV) at the University Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France.
Language: English, Signed-up students: 18, Available lessons: 5
Module: Dynamical Systems
Fatihcan Atay Principal Investigator, Coordinator of the group "Dynamical Systems and
Network Analysis", Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Language: English, Signed-up students: 46, Available lessons: 5
Module: Sistemas Complejos Sociales
Martin Hilbert , Professor at the University of Southern California, USA, and Economic
Affairs Officer of the United Nations.
Language: Spanish, Signed-up students: 47, Available lessons: 9
Module: Survey about the Etoile Platform
Survey proposed to the éToile South America community. Coordination by Carla Taramasco,
Rúben Paixão, Rui Lopes da Silva, and Jorge Louçã.
Signed-up students: 78 ,Available lessons: 2 (one survey in English and the other in Spanish)
Module: Complexity Studies in Economics
Bruno Gaminha Assistant Research Professor of Complexity in Economics at the IIT-
Gandhinagar
Jorge Louçã Professor of Computer Science at the IUL - Lisbon University Institute
Course presented in from January to May 2014 at the Indian Institute of Technology,
Gandhinagar
Signed-up students: 54, Available lessons: 16
Module: Informática: Desafíos, herramientas y ciencia
Xavier Ochoa, Verónica Gil-Costa and John Atkinson
Summer School at the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria (Valparaíso, Chile) – Sept
2012
Language: Spanish, Signed-up students: 4, Available lessons: 8
Other modules will be available during 2014, namely resources (videos, slides and texts) from summer schools, and the videos from the ECCS’14 in Lucca, next September. The Étoile Platform will become the main repository for scientific and pedagogical resources in Complex Systems Science.
The assessment software component allows professors in a module to create tests, including questions for multiple option answers, unique option answers, and open answers. The first two types are automatically evaluated by the system. Professors evaluate the open text answers.
Answers allow the inclusion of formulas using the ASCIIMathML language:
Figure 2.2. Demonstration of a formula in ASCIIMathML
Students can propose URL links to be associated to each question. URLs are ordered according to student preferences (“likes”). Students can check and study these URLs when composing their own answer.
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Figure 2.3. Adding and viewing URLs associated to a question
Questions are presented in a text, including formulas, and can have images and videos associated.
The Étoile community is composed by more than 300 researchers/students. A synthesis of the actual statistics concerning students, modules, internal resources (i.e., resources linked by professors to their modules), and external resources (i.e. URLs linked by students to the Curriculum), is on-line at http://www.etoileplatform.net/statistics :
Also, a listing of the actual members of the community, with mention to their commitment to link resources to the Curriculum (i.e., their individual “reputation”), is available at http://www.etoileplatform.net/reputation :
Mobile devices versions of the Étoile Platform are freely available for the community, in two versions:
(1) for iOS for iPad and iPod, and (2) Android for Android OS based tablets and smartphones. Both iOS and Android versions allow access to the platform modules, answer to tests, and navigate in the
Curriculum. Registration of new users should be done in the main website.
Figure 2.4. iOS and Android versions at the Google Play and iTunes on-line stores
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(a) The Étoile Peer Marking Platform (b) Best paper award at ECEL-2013
Figure 3.1 The Étoile Peer Marking Platform
The peer marking platform was developed following an initiative by Cristian Jimenez-Romero, a professional software engineer with Nokia-Siemens in Germany before joining the Open University as a full-time student in 2012. Following the suggestion of the mid-term reviewers, he implemented a computer simulation of a peer marking reputation system he had devised. Peer marking is often attacked by arguments to the effect that naïve students have insufficient knowledge or insight to mark each other. Jimez-Romero’s simulation showed that by assigning an evolving reputation, the better markers would invariably get a higher reputation than others.
As a first test of his model, in January 2013 Jimez-Romero’s worked with a colleague in Colombia on a paper-based peer marking test with about 90 secondary school students studying the native Spanish grammar and use of the language. This experiment was very successful and written up as a paper which was awarded Best PhD Paper in the European Conference on e-learning in October 2013.
During the autumn of 2013 Jimez-Romero developed a prototype peer marking platform based on his previous work and this was tested by the Open University team over the Christmas break. This testing was intended to check the user interface and the architecture of the system. For the experiment we recruited sixteen people to undertake peer marking of six Lessons on biology.
The test was very successful in terms of revealing flaws in the user interface design, involving suggesting better ways of presenting, capturing and displaying information. However it also gave interesting results on the marker behaviour and the evolution of their reputations. In particular this experiment supported the hypothesis that the better markers will be highly connected through giving similar marks to an answer, while less good markers will be relatively disconnected as their marks are more scattered.
Following this test we conducted another experiment with our colleagues in Colombia, this time using the web-based Platform. An interesting feature of this experiment was that it was necessary for the user-interface to be adapted for Spanish-speaking users. This is an indication that our peer marking platform can be used by an international audience using different languages.
We launched another experiments in May 2014 involving 48 students studying a specially created
Open University course on Global Systems Science. The purpose of this experiment was to investigate the impact of the allocation of markers to answers to test our ability to discriminate good markers from bad markers. The students were divided into four cohorts, two with eight students and two with sixteen students. Students marked three other student, and they also marked their own answers. Marking was made symmetric, so if student A marked the answer of student B, then student B marked the answer of student A. This experiment was also very successful and proved the system to be robust, both in terms of the performance of the platform and also in terms of the community of learners.
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(a) modules created by the teacher (b) assignment data for the teacher
Figure 3.2 Accessing data on the peer marking platform
The Étoile Peer Marking platform is designed to very accessible, allowing instructors to present their courses using the media they know best, including non-web-based instruction.
To use the Étoile Platform an instructor simply has to create a set of questions and marking guides, decoupled from the teaching materials they use and the media/channel used to present that teaching material.
Figure 3.3. The decoupled Étoile Peer Marking Platform can be used to assess anything
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We tested the decoupled teaching-marking approach at the 4 th PhD School for ‘Mathematical
Modelling of Complex Systems” held in Athens 14-25 July 2014. In this case students were required to study materials on hypernetworks, prior to two face-to-face lessons at the school.
Currently most summer schools give students certificates of attendance but do not have rigorous tests of what the students have learned, and do not test to see if the students have the prerequisite knowledge to benefit from the school. Étoile peer marking addresses both of these issues, and the organisers of the 5 th PhD School on ‘Mathematical Modelling of Complex Systems’ will suggest to all their lecturers that they use the Étoile system.
One of the great benefits for doctoral students attending schools and conferences is the interaction that they have with other students, explaining their research and planned thesis and receiving feedback.
The Étoile Peer Marking system can be very useful for this. For example, at the European Conference on Complex Systems in Brussels in 2012 a group of young researchers self-organised a one-day session in which everyone had 10 minutes to present their research. Their time keeping was much better than sometimes seen for more senior scientists, and this was an excellent experience for them. In this case students could use the Étoile system to give real-time evaluations of each short presentation as they saw it. An experiment along these lines is planned using the Étoile Platform at the Young research Network meeting following ECCS’14 in Lucca.
A major success of the Étoile project has been to create a network of 100+ universities and institutions worldwide to share resources for complex systems teaching and research. This network, original focused on Europe, Africa and Latin America was recognised by UNESCO as a UniTwin in 2014.
This is the largest ever UniTwin and creates a fantastic international infrastructure for complex systems research and teaching.
The main goal of CS-DC is to share research and education resources for dealing with the difficult scientific challenges of the CS-DC roadmap and to improve interactions between the most active research groups in academia. Each shared resource is scientifically described in the CS-DC
Wikiversity site, as the social intelligent ICT system of the CS-DC. This social intelligent ICT system is described in the Cooperation Programme signed between UNESCO and the CS-DC in May 2014: by this signature, UNESCO is recognizing the CS-DC as an UniTwin , i.e a “ Uni versities Twin ning network”. Each international e-departments with their e-laboratories is in responsibility of its living chapter of the CS-DC roadmap and of its sharing of the research and educational resources for dealing with its scientific challenges, through the CS-DC computational and educational cloud ecosystem. The role of Étoile in the CS-DC educational ecosystem is fundamental for a generic support of the living
Knowledge Map, Curricula, Courses of each e-departments and e-Laboratories toward a personalized education for everybody in the CS-DC. Furthermore the e-Laboratory on Education is launching the new integrative science of education based on large cohorts of educational trajectories of open LMS
(Learning Management Systems) like EdX. The main societal challenge of the integrative education science is to conciliate mass education of the XX century with the personalized education of the ancient time toward a personalized long life education for everybody in the world of the XXI century.
The UniTwin is closely aligned with the Complex Systems Society, founded in 2005. The Complex
Systems Society (CSS), through the new Working Group on Education, founded in May 2014 by the
CSS Executive Committee. This group has two main aims: (1) to collaboratively improve the
Curriculum in Complex Systems Sciences, and (2) to gather, organize and present the available CSS resources for education. The Étoile Platform is one of the most relevant tools, both for presenting the
Curriculum and for gathering the CSS scientific and pedagogical resources. The Étoile Platform has also the role of bringing together the young students/researchers at the CSS.
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We examine here how the device of a range of courses with curricula and assessments is working in these two institutions.
Curriculum
The Étoile Curriculum is based on the Grand Challenges for Complex Systems Science included in the
ASSYST Roadmap for Complex Systems Science and its Applications 2012-2020 . These Challenges are related to new challenges in ICT and formal aspects of complex systems science. They are organised under three main Categories:
1.
Questions - the transversal questions of interdisciplinary integrative science;
2.
Objects - questions related to specific objects and vertical domains of study;
3.
Education and Professional Practice - questions related to the practical problems of educating and re-educating large numbers of people in the new science, taking the science into applications in the private and public sectors, and understanding how the needs of global and local policy will direct and support the development of new science.
Categories are composed by Subjects, and those aggregate the Grand Challenges, that can still be divided into Topics.
The Curriculum is detailed in a list of Categories, Subjects and Challenges:
When logged, students can link new URLs to Challenges, creating new resources in the Curriculum, and they can vote on the best resources. This mechanism has a double result: (1) it links items in the
Curriculum to resources on Étoile or on the Internet, and (2) it identifies the most committed students, increasing their reputation in the platform.
The CSS Working Group on Education will keep on working on improving the Curriculum in
Complex Systems Sciences, namely through the call for contributions in the community for a dynamic
Curriculum, always open to improvements and to new references of the most up-to-date state-of-theart in the domain.
The Complex Systems Digital Campus is federating the Research and Education Institutions all around the world wishing to deal with the challenges of complex systems science. It will coordinate an evolving social network involved in identifying the scientific challenges through living complex systems roadmaps, and facilitate sharing all the research and educative resources for overcoming them. The Digital Campus will be structured through interdisciplinary education and research edepartments, each federating the e-laboratories of a roadmap chapter. Each interdisciplinary education and research e-laboratory is federating the e-community addressing each chapter challenge. The
Digital Campus will be strongly connected to a Citizen Cyber-science by involving citizens with their sensing, computing and thinking resources towards ubiquitous observation of multi-scale dynamics of complex systems and the assimilation of these multi-scale data by integrated multi-level models.
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The main article of the Cooperation programme is the article II about its main objectives and its main strategies for attaining them. It emphasizes the role of education, including the objective of life long personalized education for all. It is reproduced below in italic.
The main objectives of this Cooperation Programme are to:
 promote an integrated system of research, education and training, information and documentation in the domain of the science and engineering of complex systems,
 contribute to the aims of global development by taking into account its social, economic and cultural dimensions and to this end, make the science and engineering of complex systems accessible to all, in order to get the relations between science, engineering, politics and ethics to evolve towards a sustainable development,
 contribute to a research and education of the highest quality in the domain of the science of complex systems,
 promote the development of integrated knowledge and integrated models of complex systens in order to bridge the gap between science and engineering,
 promote a lifelong personalised education for all in the science of complex systems as well as in integrative and predictive sciences — including the integrative and predictive science of personalised education for all — at all levels,
 contribute to an education and training in citizen cyber-science, open to all, independently of previously achieved academic levels, respectful of the diversity of social and cultural environments, genders, religions or ways of life.
In order to achieve these objectives, the object of the current agreement is to:
 launch a Complex Systems Digital Campus as a social intelligent ICT system in order to federate all resources and efforts on education, research and the applications of the science of complex systems,
 launch the CS-DC roadmap at all scales in order to identify the scientific, educational and societal challenges of CS-DC with its cloud-based computational ecosystem and educational ecosystem,
 launch the scientific cloud-based computational ecosystem of the CS-DC in order to construct integrated multi-level models of complex systems by sharing multi-scale multi-modal data and partial multi-level models as well as software platforms and e-infrastructures of all kinds,
 launch the educational ecosystem of the CS-DC in order to construct a map of integrated knowledge, with the aim of creating and adapting educational contents as well as to develop a lifelong personalised education on complex systems.
Any shared resource in the CS-DC is scientifically described as an Wikiversity article. The CS-DC
Wikiversity is a social intelligent ICT system and every scientist in the world can participate to the scientific description of any shared resource. The list of necessary resources to be shared contains the following categories:
multi-level living roadmaps, from the institutional partners to the international level, from the e-laboratories to the e-departments,
multi-level living knowledge maps of the scientific domains from the e-laboratories to the edepartments, including large library of partial models coming from multi-scale, multi-level, multi-modal disciplinary points of view;
multi-level living large library of data bases with their metadata, especially the big data bases from the multi-scale, multi-level, multi-modal, in toto and in vivo observations; with global contests for the best gold standard data
multi-level living large library of platforms for solving the inverse problems of Complex
Systems Science, especially the assimilation of multi-scale multi-modal data by integrated
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multi-level models; with global contests for the best integrated model given the gold standard data and the library of partial models.
Multi-level living large library of curricula with their global online courses and recorded seminars for very quick learning and personalized education,
a computational and educational ecosystem using distributed infrastructure like grid/cloud computing for an easy use of shared resources above; for integrating complex systems knowledge and multi-level models.
Because the openness of each resource page in CS-DC Wikiversity, there is a moderator for each resource page. But the main advantage of the openness of the CS-DC Wikiversity site is to have living articles with crowdsourcing like Wikipedia, amplifying and accelerating the development of shared resources. For example:
 the CS-DC multi-level roadmap ceases to be written once for all the future: as the multi-level synthesis of the scientific challenges of e-departments, e-laboratories and e-project-teams, it is submitted to continuous changes.

The multi-level knowledge map of scientific concepts is constructed as scale-free networks from the multi-level scientific corpora corresponding to e-laboratories and e-departments; and any knowledge map is continuously evolving with the scientific literature and the emergence of new topics.

The emergence of new kind of shared big data, theories, methods and platforms is opening new roads toward new integrative predictive sciences.
In the CS-DC Wikiversity, the virtuous chain “multi-level roadmap -> multi-level knowledge map -> multi-level roads for complex systems science and integrative predictive sciences-> multi-level curricula“ is a living one, evolving both in a bottom up and a top down way.
In these new roads, education is education by research motivated by curiosity. This permanent education by research — that can be consider as the best way for learning in any context — is crucial because the scientific difficulties of scientific challenges in complex systems science and the very large transdisciplinary knowledge that any researcher has to deal with.
Thus two kinds of curriculum are crucial in Complex Systems Science and its application to new integrative and predictive science:
 deep theoretical curriculum and courses at the level of master/PhD/postdoc for attacking the new hot topics;
 large advanced introductions for learning very quickly and in a very coherent way a new domain. and long life education for all
The role of Étoile in the CS-DC is crucial:
 to help the scientists of e-departments, e-labs and e-project-teams to devise a large variety of curricula and courses for rapid and deep learning in a coherent way new hot topics or advanced introduction of a new domain. This design of new curricula and courses follows at all level of the CS-DC the logic of virtuous chain “multi-level roadmap -> multi-level knowledge map -> multi-level roads for complex systems science and integrative predictive sciences -> multilevel curricula“. All the logic of this virtuous chain is explicitly scientifically described in the CS-DC Wikiversity pages of shared resources. It is a living chain.
 for following attentively the educational trajectory of each scientist of the CS-DC and proposing personalized recommendation of relevant curriculum, courses, exercises.

For providing cohorts of educational trajectories to the CS-DC e-laboratory on education science for launching the new integrative science of long life personalized education for all.
5.
Recruiting & manage students to deliver Étoile education
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Table 3.1 shows that 729 students used the Étoile platform during the project. Although this is less than the target figure, as noted above, the 2012 reviewers advised us to focus more on the platform and less on the management of students and professors.
Courses and Tests using the Étoile Platform Number of students
Genetic, Immunologic, Metabolic and Social Networks, 5 lessons, English
Dynamical Systems, 5 lessons, English
Sistemas Complejos Sociales, 9 lessons, Spanish
Survey about the Etoile Platform, English and Spanish
Complexity Studies in Economics, 16 lessons
Informática: Desafíos, herramientas y ciencia, 8 lessons, Spanish
Agent Based Modelling, 1 lesson, English
Mathematical Modelling for Complex Systems, Pescara School. 2 lessons, English
Spanish Grammar and Comprehension, 8 lessons, Spanish
Biology (testing the Étoile Peer Marking Platform), 6 lessons, English
Evidence-based physiotherapy
Operations and Information Systems, 2 Lessons, French
Literaturwissenschaft Spanisch, 8 Lessons, German
Theorie und Methoden der Literaturwissensch, 8 lessons, German
An Introduction to Global Systems Science, 7 Lessons, English
Hypernetworks, 5 lessons
Young Researchers Network, peer evaluation of research
Number of students using the Étoile Platform
Table 5.1 Statistics for the use of the Étoile Platform
120
16
130
40
20
16
48
21
20
729
18
46
47
78
54
4
30
21
All of the Étoile partners have been active in recruiting students, as shown in Table 3.1.
In our tests the most important motivating factors for students have included

Personal interest and relevance to their research
 teachers or supervisors requiring their students to study particular courses
 online courses studied as part of summer schools
 certification
Generally the drive for doctoral students to study our courses has come from their professors and supervisors.
For example, we expect a major use of our courses to be new doctoral students in complex systems learning new areas required for their interdisciplinary research according to the following scenario. On beginning a doctoral course the supervisor requires their students to undergo tests in various areas implemented on the Étoile peer marking platform. After a few days the student returns to the supervisor with certificates showing how well they did on these tests. Then, for example, the supervisor may tell them “your mathematics and computing are OK, but the tests show you have an inadequate understanding of psychology and economics. Go back to the Étoile courses website and study those modules. Come back before Christmas having done the tests again and gaining acceptable scores”. We have discussed this scenario with many professors and most find it attractive because (i)
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they are in control: they decide what the student needs to know and to what level; (ii) it involves them in very little work; and (iii) it provides a method for them to detect and correct gaps in their students’ knowledge, again involving very little time and effort from the supervisor. The nature of the doctoral supervision relationship is such that students are motivated to do what their supervisors require because this is the way towards getting their doctorates.
Certification is a very strong motivating factor for students. For some of the courses we have presented students have received certificates on completion. More generally we are working with the Complex
Systems Society and the UNESCO UniTwin Complex Systems to devise appropriate certification for the wide range of courses planned.
Figure 5.1 The certificate awarded to students participating in a hypernetworks course
The Open University is currently experimenting with our peer marking systems in the context of its Virtual
M.Phil. programme on complex systems. For example, students are required to study a course on hypernetworks and it is planned to provide certificates similar to those awarded at a recent school as shown above.
The objective of the Étoile project is to provide high-quality scalable no-cost education for the complex systems community.
In the first instance this education is aimed at doctoral students and their supervisors, as well postdoctoral researchers and senior scientists.
As will be explained the Étoile model has evolved during the project.
When Étoile was first conceived it seemed that the bottleneck in providing this education was the lack of freely available courses. Our idea was that there is a ‘treasure’ of material available on the internet and that we could use crowd-sourcing to find it.
Since then the world of education has seen a quantum shift in the number of high-quality courses provided free of charge on the internet through MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Not least of these for the complex systems community are the excellent courses provided free of charge by the
Santa Fe Institute (SFI) through their Complexity Explorer platform.
The Étoile model has adapted to this. Providing unsynthesised URLs as the sole teaching materials to answer questions is not an attractive way of teaching, whereas good MOOCs provide a well-structured educational pathway.
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The major drawback of MOOCs is that they follow the agenda of someone else. For example, the excellent Introduction to Complexity course delineates what it creators think are the fundamental issues and presents them to the level they think appropriate. Inevitably another educator will want their students to study some things in more depth, some things in less depth, and to study some things that are not included. Related to this, the creators of MOOCs follow their own assessment strategy, but this may not suit another educator.
Étoile has responded to this by providing a Peer Assessment Platform that allows doctoral supervisors to create their own assessment of third party courses. Peer Assessment allows the use of probing openended questions. Crucially it is perfectly scalable – every extra student is an extra marker.
The Étoile model has therefore evolved into (i) the adaptive use of free web-based courses, augmenting them with bespoke teaching materials where necessary, and assessing them using the
Étoile platform, or (ii) creating and presenting bespoke course using the Étoile platform.
The proliferation of MOOCs since Étoile began has extended the ‘treasure’ of education resource on the internet considerably, as illustrated by the MOOCS produced by the Santa Fe Institute.
Figure 7.1 Complexity Explorer is the Santa Fe Institutes’ MOOC platform.
The SFI courses currently offered include:
Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos Winter, 2014
Mathematics for Complex Systems September 29, 2014
Nonlinear Dynamics: Mathematical and Computational Approaches. September 29, 2014
Introduction to Complexity September 29, 2014
Apart from the SFI courses which are targeted at the complex systems community, organisations such as Coursera (USA) and FutureLearn (UK) offer hundreds of courses in many domains of interest to complex systems scientists.
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(a) Coursera (b) FutureLearn
Figure 7.2 The FutureLearn consortium, led by The Open University, offer many online courses.
One could ask if the Étoile mission has been overtaken by events? Can MOOCs provide the free education we seek for the Complex Systems community?
The answer is an emphatic “no”.
The explosion in the number of MOOCs offered online reinforces our supposition that there is a treasure of resource available on the internet, and that it can be used to provide low-cost/no-cost education.
However there are various issues associated with MOOCs. The first is that a teacher wanting to make a MOOC for platforms such as Coursera or FutureLearn will have a heavy administrative overhead dealing with these organisations, probably with associated delays and costs (it can take four months to get an opening to make a course with FutureLearn, and the cost is £40,000).
It is to be hoped that high-quality MOOCs will continue to appear, but there are questions about the
‘business model’ for MOOCs. In the UK the foundation of FutureLearn was backed by millions of pounds from the UK Government, which did not want the UK to be behind in this emerging technology. However even the Open University, the leader of the FutureLearn consortium, is uncertain how to integrate no-cost MOOCS into its normal teaching, since it charges thousands of pounds for each course module studied (altogether about £15,000 for a distance learning Bachelors degree normally taking six years).
In contrast to this, a teacher wanting to make a course on anything can proceed in their own way, and use the Étoile platform at no cost for assessment and/or presentation. In this respect Étoile is much easier and cheaper (it is free) to use than some of the large MOOC platforms.
Another issue with MOOCS, or any other course, is that the person making the MOOC is setting the agenda by establishing the curriculum and deciding to what level any particular topic is taught. At doctoral level it is very unlikely that a supervisor will find a MOOC that is ideally suited to what they want their student to learn. For example, the Santa Fe Complex Systems MOOC is an excellent introduction to the field, and future students on an OU Virtual MPhil will be required study it.
However, some of the topics are not covered in enough depth, and some desired topics are not included. More importantly, the assessment on the Santa Fe MOOC does not do what is required for the M.Phil. programme. Therefore students will be required to do an assessment devised at the OU using the Étoile Peer Marking platform.
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We have concluded that URLs by themselves are not suitable for teaching, since students need a more structured learning environment. However, harvesting and sorting URLs by crowd sourcing is very useful for creating online courses. When a teacher creates a course they assemble many sources such books and articles, and many of them come from the Internet. Crowd sourced URLs can be very useful to a teacher as resource for making new courses.
In education a teacher should know the learning outcomes from what they are teaching, and have ways of measuring if those learning outcomes have been met. With its model of scalable marking of questions Étoile enables an educator to test their own desired learning outcomes, even when using courses or material devised by other people with different learning outcomes and/or different methods of testing them.
As explained in the report for WP2, Étoile has created a community of learners as the UNSECO
UniTwin Complex Systems Digital Campus, with hundreds of institutions committed at rector level to collaborate in complex systems teaching and research.
Within this community the scientists are explicitly committed to working together, and in this context it is possible define curricula and share the work of creating many courses for this particular community.
Étoile concepts are embedded in this community and the Étoile platform will be used to make, present, examine and certificate courses.
An interesting and important aspect of this is, that like all courses, the CS-DC courses will not satisfy all members of the this community. It is certain that, even within this highly integrated organisation, different scientists will give different weight to the learning outcomes our courses and want have their own means of assessing them. The Étoile platform provides a simple way for them to do this.
The Étoile model has evolved during the project, and the current model works very well. This evolution has involved the extension of our original approach to assessment to include peer marking, which has proved to be a major success.
The evolution of Étoile has also been impacted by the appearance of MOOCs, including those made by the complex systems community itself. However, we have observed that courses made for one purpose may not serve another, and most doctoral supervisors will find any pre-existing course imperfect for their requirements. The possibility of creating their own assessment allows them to use courses made by others, but also add specific extra things.
Through the Complex Systems Digital Campus, there is already has an established community of learners ready to use the Étoile model for a large programme of distance teaching and accreditation.
Our conclusion is that the current Étoile model is very well adapted for the purpose of creating high-quality scalable free education for the international complex systems community; the
CS-DC provides the necessary infrastructure for this education to be successfully created and delivered; and this is already operational with the first of many planned MOOCs to be presented in the Spring of 2015.
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• AIMSSénégal | Sénégal
• Representative: Mamadou Sanghare, director of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences
AIMSSénégal, Dakar | e-mail | web
• Université de Cergy-Pontoise | France
• Representative: Laura Hernandez, professor at Université de Cergy-Pontoise, Cergy-Pontoise | email | web
• NIAS - National Institute of Advanced Studies | India
• Representative: Rajesh Kasturirangan, Associate Professor at the School of Humanities, NIAS | email | web
• Rouen Business School | France
• Representative: Jérôme Verny, professor at Rouen Business School, Rouen | e-mail | web
• ISCTE-IUL Lisbon University Institute | Portugal
• Representative: Jorge Louçã, professor at Lisbon University Institute, Lisbon | e-mail | web
• Université Cheikh Antia Diop | Sénégal
• Representative: Mamadou Sanghare, professor at Université Cheikh Antia Diop, Dakar | web
• Université Gaston Berger | Sénégal
• Representative: Mamadou Abdoul Diop, professor at Université Gaston Berger | e-mail | web
• Universidade Estadual Paulista | Brasil
• Representative: Maria Eunice Quilici Gonzalez, professor at Universidade Estadual Paulista | e-mail
| web
• Instituto de Si stemas Complejos de Valparaíso | Chile
• Representative: Edmundo Bustos Azócar, executive director at Instituto de Sistemas Complejos de
Valparaíso | e-mail | web
• École Centrale d’Electronique | France
• Representative: Pascal Brouaye, director of École Centrale d’Electronique | e-mail | web
• Instituto Balseiro, Centro Atómico Bariloche - UNCUYO Universidad Nacional de Cuyo | Argentina
• Representative: Marcelo Kuperman, professor at Instituto Balseiro and head of FiEstIn | e-mail | web
• Université du Havre | France
• Representative: Cyrille Bertelle, professor at Université du Havre and Director of the Research
Laboratory LITIS | e-mail | web
• Université Paris 8 | France
• Representative: Jean-Marc Meunier, professor at Université Paris 8 | web
• Universidad de Valparaíso | Chile
• Representative: Carla Taramasco, researcher at CNRS/École Polytechnique | e-mail | web
• ISI Foundation | Italy
• Representative: Mario Rasetti, director of ISI and of the Doctorate School, Politecnico di Torino | email | web
• Ésitpa - École d'Ingénieurs en Agriculture | France
• Representative: Salima Taibi, professor at Ésitpa - École d'Ingénieurs en Agriculture | e-mail
• CIEMAT - Centro de Investigationes Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas | Spain
• Representative: Francisco Prieto Castrillo, researcher at CIEMAT | e-mail | web
• University of Carthage | Tunisia
• Representative: Adel Bouhoula, professor at University of Carthage | e-mail
• Universitat de les Illes Balears | Spain
• Representative: Maxi San Miguel, professor at Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas
Complejos - Universitat de les Illes Balears | e-mail | web
• Universitad del Desarrollo | Chile
• Representative: Miguel Angel Fuentes Rebolledo, professor at Universitad del Desarrollo
• Universidad National de General Sarmiento | Argentina
• Representative: Miguel Virasoro, researcher at Universidad National de General Sarmiento | e-mail
• Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas | Brasil
• Representative: Fernando Lazaro Freire Junior, director of the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas
Fisicas | e-mail | web
• Instituto Nacional de Ciencia e Tecnologia de Sistemas Complexos | Brasil
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• Representative: Constantino Tsallis, coordinator of the Instituto Nacional de Ciencia e Tecnologia de Sistemas Complexos | e-mail | web
• Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Sciences | Germany
• Representative: Jörg Lehnert, scientific coordinator at the Max Planck Institute | e-mail
• Lebanese University | Lebanon
• Representative: Mustapha Jazar, professor at Lebanese University | e-mail | web
• Universidad Industrial de Santander | Colombia
• Representative: Sergio Castillo, professor at Universidad Industrial de Santander
• Universidad Técnica Federico Santa Maria | Chile
• Representative: Hernán Astudillo, professor at Universidad Técnica Federico Santa Maria | e-mail | web
• Universidad de Buenos Aires | Argentina
• Representative: Daniel Heymann, professor at Departamento de Economía, Universidad de Buenos
Aires | e-mail | web
• Universidad Diego Portales | Chile
• Representative: Javier Pereira, professor at Universidad Diego Portales | e-mail | web
• Universidad de Pamplona | Colombia
• Representative: Nelson Fernández, professor at Universidad de Pamplona | web
• Universidade Politécnica de Moçambique | Mozambique
• Representative: Lourenço Dias Almeida da Silva, professor at Universidade Politécnica de
M oçambique | e-mail
• Instituto Universitario de Investigación Biocomputación y Física de Sistemas Complejos -
Universidad de Zaragoza | Spain
• Representative: Yamir Moreno, professor at Universidad de Zaragoza | e-mail | web
• Universidade Federal do ABC | Brasil
• Representative: Guiou Kobayashi, professor at Universidade Federal do ABC | e-mail | web | and
José Artur Quilici-Gonzalez, professor at Universidade Federal do ABC | e-mail | web
• Université de Strasbourg | France
• Representative: Pierre Collet, professor at Université de Strasbourg | e-mail | web
• Université de Technologie de Belfort Montbéliard | France
• Representative: Vincent Hilaire | e-mail | web
• Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico | Mexico
• Representative: Carlos Gershenson | e-mail | web
• Universidad de Los Andes | Venezuela
• Representative: Jose Aguilar, professor at Universidad de Los Andes | e-mail | web
• Universidad de Camagüey | Cuba
• Representative: Marcelo Chacón Reyes, professor at Universidad de Camagüey | e-mail
• Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul | Brasil
• Representative: Sebastián Gonçalves, professor at Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul | email | web
• Universidad Nationale of Colombia | Colombia
• Representative: Jonatan Gómez Perdomo, professor at Facultad de Ingeniería de la Sede Bogotá | e-mail | web
• INRA - Institut National de Recherche Agronomique | France
• Representative: Frédérick Garcia, researcher at INRA | e-mail | web
• Univ ersidad Politécnica de Madrid | Spain
• Representative: Andrés Santos, professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid| e-mail | web
• Université de Yaoundé I | Cameroon
• Representative: Maurice Tchuente, professor at the Université de Yaoundé I | e-mail
• Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo | Japan
• Representative: Kazuyuki Aihara, professor at Institute of Industrial Science, The University of
Tokyo| e-mail | web
• Université de Sousse | Tunisia
• Representative: Ouajdi Korbaa, professor at Université de Sousse | e-mail
• Université Gafsa | Tunisia
• Representative: Amine Kadimallah, director of the Institut Supérieur d'Arts et Métiers de Gafsa | email
• Kairouan University | Tunisia
• Representative: Karim Bouchleighim
• Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.
| Japan
• Representative: Masatoshi Funabashi | e-mail
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• Université de Gabès | Tunisia
• Representative: Nejib Ihzaz
• Universidad de Málaga | Spain
• Representative: Enrique Alba Torres | e-mail | web
• University of Warwick | United Kingdon
• Representative: Yasmin Merali | e-mail | web
• Politechnika Poznanska | Poland
• Representative: Krysztof Krawiec | e-mail | web
• University of Sciences and Technology Houari Boumediene | Algeria
• Representative: Linda Boumghar
• École Nationale Supérieure d'Informatique | Algeria
• Representative: Si Larabi Khelifati
• Universidad de Córdoba | Spain
• Representative: Rafael Cerrillo | web
• Universidad Ricardo Palma | Peru
• Representatives: Teresa Salinas-Gamero | e-mail and Enver Oruro
• Université de Mascara | Algeria
• Representative: Souidi Zahira | e-mail
• Universidade de São Paulo | Brasil
• Representative: Flavia Mori Sarti | e-mail | web
• Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia | Peru
• Representative: Luis Mendoza | e-mail | web
• IRES Piemonte - Istituto di Ricerche Economico Sociali | Italia
• Representative: Sylvie Occelli | e-mail | web
• Universidad Simon Bolívar | Venezuela
• Representative: Klaus Jaffe Carbonell | e-mail | web
• Universidad Andrés Bello | Chile
• Representative: Karin Berlien | e-mail
• Université de Tunis El Manar | Tunisia
• Representative: Slimane Ben Miled | web
• Universidad de Sevilla | Spain
• Representative: Antonio Córdoba | e-mail | web
• Universidad del País Vasco | Spain
• Representative: Xabier Barandiaran | e-mail | web
• LABORES – Laboratoire de Recherche Scientifique pour les sciences naturelles et digitales |
France
• Representative: Fernando Soler-Toscano | e-mail | web
• Universidade Federal de Sergipe | Brasil
• Representative: Jugurta Montalvão | web
• Université de Tunis | Tunisia
• Representative: Moncef Boukthir | e-mail
• Universidad de Chile | Chile
• Representative: Roberto Araya | e-mail | web
• Genopole | France
• Representative: François Képès | e-mail | web
• The Open University | United Kingdom
• Representative: Jeffrey Johnson | e-mail | web
• Université de la Manouba | Tunisia
• Representative: Jouhaina Gherib | e-mail
• Universidad National de San Antonio Abad del Cusco | Peru
• Representative: Julio César Carbajal Luna | e-mail
• École Polytechnique de Thiès | Sénégal
• Representative: Oumar Niang | e-mail
• Faculty of Sciences - University of Lisbon | Portugal
• Representative: Helder Coelho | e-mail | web
• Multiversidad Mundo Real Edgar Morin | Mexico
• Representative: Alexandre de Pomposo | e-mail | web
• Fundação Getulio Vargas | Brasil
• Representative: Alexandre Gonçalves Evsukoff | e-mail | web
• ISEG | Portugal
• Representative: Tanya Araújo | e-mail | web
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• Bar-Ilan University | Israel
• Representative: Mina Teicher | e-mail | web
• ECAM Strasbourg-Europe | France
• Representative: Pierre Parrend | e-mail | web
• Universidade de Aveiro | Portugal
• Representative: José Fernando Mendes | e-mail | web
• Mohammed V University - Agdal | Morocco
• Representative: Rajaâ Cherkaoui El Moursli | e-mail | web
• Hassan II Academy of Science and Technology | Morocco
• Representative: Omar Fassi-Fehri | e-mail | web
• Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne | France
• Representative: Patrick Siarry | e-mail | web
• Université of Namur | Belgium
• Representative: Timoteo Carletti | e-mail | web
• Université Hassan II - Casablanca | Morocco
• Representative: Mohamed Belhaq | e-mail
• Université Abdelmalek Essaâdi | Morocco
• Representative: Ahmed El Moussaoui | e-mail
• National Taiwan Normal University | Taiwan
• Representative: Chun-Yen Chang | e-mail | web
• University of Southampton | United Kingdon
• Representative: Seth Bullock | e-mail | web
• Euro-Mediterranean University of Fez | Morocco
• Representative: Sebastien Vaudreuil
• Université Ibn Zohr | Marocco
• Representative: Fattehallah Ghadi| e-mail | web
• Universidad de Granada | Spain
• Representative: Óscar Cordón García | e-mail | web
• Université of Lausane | Swisse
• Representatives: Céline Rozenblat | e-mail | web | and Solange Ghernaouti | e-mail | web
• Institut Régional et Européen des métiers de l'Intérvention Sociale | France
• Representative: Catherine Lenzi | e-mail | web
• Politecnico Di Milano | Italy
• Representative: Giovanni Rabino | e-mail | web
• Beijing Normal University | China
• Representative: Zhangang Han | e-mail | web
• Cheng Kung University | Taiwan
• Representative: Yueh-Min Huang | e-mail | web
• New York University - Polytechnic Institute (NYUpoly) | USA
• Representative: Charles S. Tapiero | e-mail | web
• École Pratique des Hautes Études | France
• Representative: Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra | e-mail
• National Chengchi University (NCCU) | Taiwan
• Representative: Shu-Heng Shen | e-mail | web
• Université de Sciences, de Technologie et de Médecine | Mauritanie
• Representative: NDongo Mamoudou
• Université de Rouen | France
• Representative: Ludovic Seifert | e-mail | web
• Narodowe Centrum Badan Jadrowych | Poland
• Representative: Pawel Sobkowicz | e-mail
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