[MUSIC] Hello. Welcome to Fundamentals of Global Energy Business. This course is intended to provide a very high-level survey of the nature of our primary energy resources and considerations for business involved in developing those resources. This week we'll consider the nature of demand for these primary energy resources including the geographic distribution of demand. In week two. We'll consider the nature of supply and here our interest is going to be in the geographic distribution of primary energy supplies, and how the location of those resources differs from the location of demand. Next we'll turn to, let's say, the practical, often times technical considerations for developing our primary energy resources. Here we're thinking about factor inputs. So the labor, and lumber, and other goods and services that we need to bring together in order to develop energy. And of course we will also survey the essential technological factors that are brought to bear to develop these resources, the technologies within which our factor inputs are applied. And we'll see that developing our energy resources is a very complex undertaking, requiring coordination of a broad range of technologies, skills, and inputs. In week four, We'll turn our attention to political markets. And here, you'll notice that the integrated and systemic nature of primary energy development goes way beyond the technologies and diverse set of inputs that are required to develop energy. Developing energy, transporting it and using it. All of these things impact a broad range of stakeholders. And those stakeholders will act through a variety of political forums to influence energy development activities. And we'll conclude by considering the strategic implications of all of these various factors, these market factors, commercial factors, and political factors that we've examined throughout the course. Assessments are going to be conducted through weekly quizzes and a few writing assignments. Our quizzes will be multiple choice and you'll be able to make multiple attempts, if you'd like to. I believe that allowing for multiple attempts enables us to use the quizzes as learning exercises rather than simply assessments, so I hope you'll find that is the case. The writing assignments are going to take the form of business memorandum, so I'm going to provide a situation or describe some kind of problem and what I want you to do is provide an analysis or recommendation to that situation. I'm gonna limit the submissions to 800 words, that's equivalent to about a two page business memo, single spaced. So don't feel obligated to submit 800 words if you can sort of concisely and coherently address the issue or problem in a single page memo, that's fine. I just wanna put some kind of limit on the assignment. And then importantly I wanna describe how the peer assessment process is gonna work. Since this is new for me, just like it is for many of you, even though this is a new exercise for me from the teaching perspective, the one thing I'm sure of is I don't have time to grade thousands of written assignments. But I do think that having to synthesize some of the material in the form of a written assignment is important. So, what we're gonna try to do is see if we can make peer assessments work. And the way that is going to work is, once you've submitted your assignment I am going to have the system randomly assign three peer submissions to you, and I will provide a rubric, just some basic criteria. I don't want this to become your life's work, but some basic criteria that you should use to evaluate the peer submissions. And then once you've evaluated those submissions, you will be asked to evaluate your own submission according to the same criteria that's detailed in the rubric. So, I hope you choose to participate in the course. I know many have signed up but I hope you're able to watch the videos, and participate in the assessments. And in addition to that, try to seek some outside readings related to the subject matter. And to the greatest extent possible, I am going to try to participate in the discussion groups. I'll try to peek in there, every day at least, and engage with you a bit in that form. So I look forward to getting started. I'll see you in the next video. [MUSIC]
