This is a free course in English suitable for a wide international audience seeking to improve their analytical skills. This course is also ideal for prospective applicants to international business schools, because amongst other factors, they evaluate candidates' analytical skills. We believe that this course can even help you to prepare better for the GMAT test - one of the major requirements for admission – which assesses your analytical and critical skills.
This course provides an introduction to critical thinking, informal logic, and a small amount of formal logic. Its purpose is to provide you with the basic tools of analytical reasoning, which will give you a distinctive edge in a wide variety of careers and courses of study.
The course emphasises learning how to think effectively. The techniques and concepts introduced in the course are essential to the practice of nearly every major discipline. Moreover, the course touches upon a wide range of reasoning skills, from verbal argument analysis to formal logic, visual and statistical reasoning, to scientific methodology, and creative thinking.
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
- describe what critical thinking is, and explain why it is valuable;
- assess the credibility and reliability of sources;
- distinguish between good and bad definitions, recognise the differences between explicit and implicit meaning, and remove ambiguities of meaning from unclearly worded statements;
- recognise arguments in writing, evaluate good and bad arguments, and construct sound arguments of their own;
- diagnose the most common reasoning errors and fallacies as well as identify ways of improving them;
- describe and apply the basics of sentential and categorical logic;
- describe and apply the rudiments of scientific methodology and reasoning;
- analyze and evaluate arguments using visualization tools; and
- describe and apply the basics of strategic reasoning and problem solving.
About the course
The first unit introduces the terrain of critical thinking and covers the basics of meaning analysis, while the second unit provides a primer in analysing arguments. All of the material in these first units will be built upon in subsequent units, which cover informal and formal logic, Venn diagrams, scientific reasoning, as well as strategic and creative thinking.
Start date: self-paced course
Length: Approximately 72.75 hours to complete
Professor: Nicholaos Jones
Platform: Saylor
