Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age
https://www.coursera.org/learn/mindware/
This course is taught by Richard E. Nisbett, the author of Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking and a number of academic articles. The book is pretty interesting and useful by itself and like the course it isn’t exactly about critical thinking. At least the author haven’t stated that, but in the same time the course teaches many things you can find in critical thinking handbook and courses.
As a student you can get some knowledge about statistics and its application in different areas, also about designing experiments and using correlation correctly. You can also learn how to make better predictions and better decisions, how cognitive biases influences us, and how to reason logically. Of course if you know about these topics you can use the course to refresh your memory or just skip some lessons.
The course is a short one, only four weeks and it requires only a small commitment, about 3-4 hours a week. So you would spend only about 12-16 hours for the whole course.
It doesn’t require any prior knowledge in critical thinking, decision theory, statistics, and logic. Still you may need a high school education to better understand some topics. In the same time the author recommends the course for anyone who wants to go to a college. I agree because it can give you basic concepts of decision theory so you can plan your future and evaluate what kind of further education you need. As an alternative you can find an advisor to help you to make a decision like this, but it also may cost time or money.
The author says that students can apply their knowledge to everyday life and I agree with that. But you still need to think and plan how to do that. Anyway this course gives enough practical knowledge to be considered useful.
The course is created by University of Michigan.
Published on 2018-09-20
Tags: critical thinking, course review
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