Key Information
About the content
Improve your logical and critical thinking skills in this free online course. Identify common obstacles to effective thinking.
We are constantly being given reasons to do and believe things: to believe that we should buy a product, support a cause, accept a job, judge someone innocent or guilty, that fairness requires us to do some household chore, and so on. Assessing the reasons we are given to do or believe these things calls upon us to think critically and logically.
Improve your logical and critical thinking skills
Even though we’re called upon to use our critical and logical thinking skills all the time, most of us are not that good at it. This free online course aims to help you develop and improve these skills.
You’ll learn how to:
- identify and avoid common thinking mistakes that lead to the formation of bad beliefs;
- recognise, reconstruct and evaluate arguments;
- use basic logical tools to analyse arguments;
- and apply those tools in areas including science, moral theories and law.
Syllabus
- Explore key concepts in logical and critical thinking
- Apply key concepts in logical and critical thinking
- Identify obstacles to logical and critical thinking
- Identify the components of a good argument
- Produce an argument in standard form
- Classify deductive and non-deductive arguments
- Evaluate arguments based on criteria such as validity, strength and cogency
- Interpret scientific, moral and legal arguments
- Develop an argument "in the wild"
- Assess arguments charitably
Instructors
- Tim Dare
- Patrick Girard
Content Designer
The University of Auckland is New Zealand’s leading university and the only one included in the Times Higher Education top 200.
Founded in 1883, it is also the highest ranked New Zealand university in the QS World University Rankings and Shanghai Jiao Tong Academic Ranking of World Universities. Some 35 percent of the top ranked academic researchers in New Zealand are at the University of Auckland.
Teaching and research is conducted over eight faculties and two large-scale research institutes. The university has a very strong Arts and Humanities programmes, the largest Science programme in New Zealand, and professional undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Architecture, Engineering, Law and Medicine.
It is the only New Zealand university invited to be a member of Universitas 21, the World Universities Network (WUN) and the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, consortia of prestigious global universities. In addition, the university engages regularly with the Go8 universities in Australia. These international linkages are vital to a teaching and research University which strives to be academically excellent and to provide its staff and students with the best possible educational and career opportunities.
Platform
FutureLearn is a massive open online course (MOOC) learning platform founded in December 2012.
It is a company launched and wholly owned by The Open University in Milton Keynes, England. It is the first UK-led massive open online course learning platform, and as of March 2015 included 54 UK and international University partners and unlike similar platforms includes four non-university partners: the British Museum, the British Council, the British Library and the National Film and Television School.
