Introduction to Systems Thinking Self-Study Course at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security: Update

Background

In the summer 2017 Wendy Walsh, FEMA's Higher Education Program Manager, and I got in touch about creating an introduction to systems thinking self-study course for emergency management and homeland security practitioners. The objective was to create an online course that would introduce practitioners to systems thinking while directly connecting them to the related literature. In this way the course would serve an educational purpose while also becoming a resource.

A few weeks after our initial phone call we met in Santa Cruz while Wendy put on the region's collaborative engagement in Palo Alto and I served as the report writer. While we were out in California, we met with Jodi Stiles and Glen Woodburry at the Navalpost Graduate School (NPS) who agreed to house the course and move it from a Word document to its final online format.

Over two days, we created the design brief for the course that included flow and scope, modules, and a list of systems thinkers and concepts to in…