Critical Thinking Skills for University Success

https://www.coursera.org/learn/critical-thinking-skills

The main focus of this course is preparation for a university. The course is taught by Katherine Olston and Luke Alexander from the University of Sydney.

The authors give a number of critical thinking disposition, for example inquisitiveness, truth-seeking, and self-confidence. After that a student can understand better what critical thinking is. The authors also discuss formal and informal argumentation methods, how to ask questions to get a desired answer. They discuss how to understand new information and how to compare it with knowledge people already have. They use texts to demonstrate these methods of working with information.

The course can also give you a basic understanding of formal logic, including deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning. You can also study how complex systems can work and how emergent properties can appear from such systems.

The author also discuss methods of manipulations and how can logic fallacies can be used. You can study method how to detect and avoid such fallacies and manipulations. The authors also give a review of cognitive biases.

In the course you can find how different kinds of argument work, how to understand them better, and how to avoid related fallacies. You can also study a Toulmin method of reasoning.

I can recommend this course as a good starting point to study critical thinking. Of course, you can find a number of other courses and choose one you like the most. Still, this one is worth considering.

The course isn’t very big, you need only from two to four hours of study for six weeks. So in total your commitment would be from 12 to 24 hours. This course is a part of specialisation Academic Skills for University Success Specialization, other courses in this specialisation can teach you digital literacy, problem solving skills, communication skills, and academic skills. All these courses were created by the University of Sydney.