Ever struggled with some of those mind-boggling questions of who-sits-beside-who if they-don’t-sit-beside-them questions in an aptitude test? Well, our minds have not been trained to look into such minute details and instead frequently directly jump to conclusions, which puts us in this endless loop of reiterated thinking. These are aimed at testing your critical thinking skills by testing your brain on how many variables it can handle at one time.
Besides their testing in a variety of aptitude tests of entrance examinations in colleges and universities, critical thinking skills have immense utility in solving real-life problems which require quick decision-making.
List of 16 Top Critical Thinking Online Courses And Certificate Programs
If you wish to improve your capability in working focused intense situations through critical thinking skills development, here are some of the top critical thinking courses that you will find online.
1. Master Cognitive Biases And Improve your Critical Thinking – Udemy
This on-demand video course offered by philosopher Kevin dePlante deliberates upon the fundamentals and effects of cognitive bias, which is our natural tendency to jump to certain decisions without proper analysis so as to retain efficiency. This course will teach you to master your confirmation bias, pattern-seeking, anchoring, and hindsight bias and will significantly improve your critical thinking skills.
By the end of this course, you will have developed several different perspectives towards various different thinking methods and gained confidence in applying such techniques in your life.
Course Highlights:
- Gain a Certificate of Completion upon completing this course.
- Access this course from both mobile and pc devices.
- Understand what cognitive bias actually is and how it affects your critical thinking skills.
- Understand how cognitive biases are a necessary evil.
- Learn about the different types of cognitive biases and how to master them.
- Learn how these debiasing techniques can be applied simply and effectively.
- The course provides lifetime access to videos and materials.
Course Duration: 2.5 hours
2. Introduction to Logic And Critical Thinking Specialization – Duke University
The curriculum of this four-segment course consists of providing you with a proper understanding of the benefits of establishing proper arguments along with learning the different types of arguments and how they can be formulated. Further, this course will advance your critical thinking skills and techniques with the help of thorough analysis and logical reasoning.
Not only will this course show you the beauty of analyzing others’ arguments for forming your own arguments but also will show how your thinking skills can be elevated through proper guidance.
Course Highlights:
- Gain a Certificate of Completion from an accredited university upon completing this course.
- No prior experience is required.
- Substantially improves critical thinking skills and reasoning process.
- Optional projects can opt for a hands-on practical experience.
- Flexible adjustable schedules.
- Get to know about the ways in which fallacies can be detected.
Course Duration: 4 months
3. Creative Thinking: Techniques And Tools for Success – Imperial College London
You can solve problems requiring critical analysis faster and more efficiently using your creativity. This free online course contains in its curriculum the different ways of thinking for evoking creativity. Besides demonstrating how creativity can be beneficial in critical situations, this short course further teaches you how to implement morphological analysis in life scenarios.
The course will equip you with one of the more orthodox techniques of solving critical problems through creativity and will allow you to gain confidence even in tough situations.
Course Highlights:
- Gain a certificate upon completing this course.
- Recommended for beginners.
- Learn how creativity can greatly help in solving problems requiring critical analysis.
- Learn about newer thinking styles and gain a new perspective.
- Gain necessary analysis skills which attract employers.
Course Duration: 20 hours
4. Critical Thinking Strategies for Better Decisions – Udemy
This business-focused online course curated for the Udemy Business collection teaches you to master the skill of critical thinking for you to apply in your business or organization to gain optimum results. More importantly, it elaborates upon the different problems that frequently arise while critically analyzing and solving a problem along with guiding you through the various methods of approaching it.
Enrolling in this course will benefit you in terms of both improving your business perspective as well as in formulating your own critical thinking plan.
Course Highlights:
- Gain a Certificate of Completion upon completing this National Association of State Boards of Accountancy(NASBA) course and passing with 70% marks or more in the final assessment.
- Access course resources through both mobile and PC devices.
- Recommended for persons heading a business or working in a business environment.
- Gain 2.0 NASBA CPE credits upon completing this course.
- Learn the concept of critical analysis in an in-depth fashion and master its application.
- Understand the different approaches towards critical thinking.
- Get to know about the various techniques that can be used to leverage critical thinking.
- The course provides lifetime access to course resources.
Course Duration: Self Paced
5. Master Your Critical Thinking, and Decision-Making Skills – Udemy
This course utilizes research-based data and teaches you the analysis of psychology, cognitive, behavioural science, and behavioural economics which will significantly improve your decision-making and critical thinking skills which you can implement in your work. Further, you will be able to learn various de-biasing skills which will aid you in every decision that you take.
In this course, you will be taught by an experienced teacher with several years of experience in top companies like Microsoft and Verizon. By the end of this online video course, you will develop the necessary critical thinking and logical argument formulation skills necessary for any problem.
Course Highlights:
- Requires no prior experience.
- Gain a Certificate of Completion upon completion of this course.
- Recommended for anyone who wants to improve their critical thinking and logical sense.
- Access course material through both mobile and PC devices.
- Learn about decision-making and cognitive bias and how they can affect the choices you make.
- Learn de-biasing strategies and the ways in which you can prevent fallacies.
- The course provides lifetime access to course materials.
Course Duration: Self Paced
6. Critical Thinker Academy: Learn to Think Like a Philosopher – Udemy
This online course on Udemy provides both fundamental knowledges as well as implementation approaches of critical thinking skills. Regardless of your strength in critical thinking, this course will teach you how to think differently and efficiently, which will benefit you in all spheres of your life. Moreover, in this course, you will learn about cognitive biases, fallacies, and other hurdles which lay in the course of critical analysis. You will learn to look at the world through the eyes of a philosopher.
By the end of this course, you will open your mind to a different perspective of viewing situations and will be able to tackle every problem with efficiency and accuracy with your critical thinking skills.
Course Highlights:
- Earn a Certificate of Completion upon completing this course.
- Course contains videos as well as articles. Content can be downloaded.
- Learn essential critical thinking methods.
- Learn how psychological biases such as political inclination affect your decision-making skills.
- Learn how “rational and scientific” debates sometimes tweak the meaning of essential terms such as hypothesis, theory, and fact.
- Get to know how a philosopher thinks.
- Course provides lifetime access to resources.
- Access course material from both mobile and PC devices.
Course Duration: 19 hours
7. Critical Thinking-An Upgrade for Your Mind – Udemy
This online course offered by the leading professional philosopher Dr. Stephen Law teaches you to become a more efficient and creative thinker. Not only will it benefit you in terms of gaining critical thinking and reasoning skills but it will also demonstrate how training your mind can prevent yourself from falling for false news, propaganda, and prejudice.
Joining this course will not only make you a more penetrating thinker but also will teach you the ways you can utilize critical thinking to rationally persuade others which has tremendous utility in all of our lives.
Course Highlights:
- Earn a Certificate of Completion upon completing this course.
- Access course material from both mobile and PC devices.
- Learn to think and argue more efficiently.
- Learn to become self-aware.
- The course utilizes the latest updates in the field of psychology in its curriculum.
- Provides lifetime access to course materials.
Course Duration: Self Paced
8. Critical Thinking Skills for The Professional – Coursera
This course will guide you to bring out proper and viable solutions to problems that you may need to solve in your professional field and that too quickly and efficiently. Besides teaching the foundational knowledge required for proper critical thinking, the course will teach you to properly brainstorm and analyze problems so you can bring out solutions with ease.
This course will prove to be extremely beneficial in your work-life if you are usually burdened with bringing out answers to general questions and will show you the different ways in which you can utilize feedback.
Course Highlights:
- Earn a Certificate of Completion upon completing this course.
- Learners should have at least 1-2 years of experience for enrolling in this course.
- Learn how critical thinking can simplify complex problems.
- Learn to create a specific problem solving model suitable for your work nature.
- Gain essential thinking and decision making skills.
Course Duration: 8 hours
9. Mindware-Critical Thinking for The Information Age – University of Michigan
In this Information age where the amount of data has become overwhelming, this course will teach you to effectively manage and analyze data and utilize it in bringing out solutions. Further, it will show you how to distinguish factors that affect your results from ones that don’t. This will not only reduce your thinking load but will also help to improve the quality of long-term solutions.
Course Highlights:
- Gain a Certificate of Completion upon completing this course.
- Beginner-friendly
- Learn to use statistical tools such as cost-benefit analysis, standard deviation, the effect of variable and correlation to gain optimum solutions .
- Learn the different methods in which you can shrink the huge amounts of experimental data you receive into more useful parts which have value.
- Learn about the different types of errors such as systematic and gross errors and hence learn to make predictions.
- Learn about cognitive bias and the ways in which it affects our thinking.
- Learn to efficiently analyse data.
Course Duration: 13 hours
10. Critical Thinking Cornell Certificate Program – eCornell(Cornell University)
Disciplined study and implementation of critical thinking will allow you to face each and every problem with confidence. This online course offered by Cornell University has six sub-courses in its curriculum which focus on the development of your problem solving, critical thinking, psychological analysis, and strategy development skills.
By the end of attending this course, you will be gaining a university-accredited certificate in Critical Thinking and the skills imparted to you by it will be useful in many aspects of your life.
Course Highlights:
- Gain a Critical Thinking Certificate upon completion.
- Learn psychological persuasion skills.
- Learn to make decisions effectively and timely and develop confidence.
- Learn about human behavioral patterns.
Course Duration : 3 months
11. Level 2 Intelligence Analyst Certificate – Udemy
Proper analysis and critical thinking skills will allow you to explain the occurrence of a phenomenon using the relevant data. The curriculum of this course focuses upon the mastery of explanative intelligence and provides a comprehensive catalog of skills that are essential for answering any question analytically.
Course Highlights:
- Recommended for intermediate intelligence analysts.
- Gain a Certificate of Completion upon completing this course.
- Access course material from both mobile and PC devices.
- Learn and demonstrate critical thinking skills for solving practical problems.
- Learn to beat negative thinking for optimum results.
- Learn the important skill of structure analysis.
- Learn various analytic techniques.
Course Duration: Self Paced
12. Leadership and Critical Thinking Specialization – Coursera
Efficient and strong leadership capabilities will timelessly stimulate growth in your organization or business. The curriculum of this course provides you with many effective leadership strategies and techniques along with ways of employing critical thinking skills in the work that you do.
Moreover, this course guides you to develop your own unique leadership style along with sharpening your leadership strategies.
Course Highlights:
- Recommended for you if you already work in an industry that requires strong critical thinking skills.
- Must have completed Level 1 of the same course
- Gain a Certificate of Completion upon completing the course.
- Access course material from both mobile and PC devices.
- Develop leadership qualities.
- Develop clear and persuasive communication skills.
- Learn about critical self awareness and how to develop it.
Course Duration: 3 months
13. Mastering Thinking Skill Vol 1 : The 12 Fundamental Skills – Udemy
This course will allow you to delve into a number of thinking perspectives which when used will show significant improvement in your school, college, or work. It discusses the 12 fundamental thinking skills which can be utilized to improve your efficiency in your field.
Further, these 12 fundamental skills are based on the recent groundbreaking updates in psychological analysis and enrich you with confidence and critical thinking skills.
Course Highlights:
- Gain a Certificate of Completion upon completing the course.
- Access course material from both mobile and PC devices.
- Recommended for working adults, entrepreneurs and students.
- Learn about metacognition and develop essential problem-solving skills.
- Improve your creativity.
- Greatly enhance your decision-making and critical thinking skills.
- Provides bonus skills for further improvement.
- The course provides life access to course material.
Course Duration: 4 hours
14. Critical Thinking And Decision Making – Manchester Institute of Technology
This course offered by MIT teaches you the indelible skills of deductive thinking, metacognition, critical thinking, and Bayes’s Law. Working professionals will greatly benefit from this course since this course also teaches you to apply the lessons learned in practical situations which will aid in future projects.
Course Highlights:
- Earn a Professional Certificate and 1.25 Continuing Education Units(EDUs) upon completing this course.
- Learn about critical thinking and decision taking skills.
- Learn to apply such skills in your professional environment.
- Learn to relate evidence to problems and produce proper solutions.
- Connect with one of the best technological communities in the world.
- Learn from the world-class faculty at MIT.
- Watch videos of this course on-demand.
Course Duration : 3 weeks
15. How to Think Differently: 7 Easy Steps to Master Mental Models, Critical Thinking & Problem Solving – Skillshare
Having original thought will benefit both in excelling in your own work as well as attracting the employer’s eye. This course teaches you to develop a completely unique thinking process and employ critical thinking skills for the same. By enrolling in this course, you will be able to clearly visualize how you can master your thinking skills and work on the same through a practical project.
Course Highlights:
- Provides a quick and comprehensive insight to the benefits of original thought.
- Learn essential decision-making and critical thinking skills.
- Learn to become a master strategist.
- Learn to focus upon your long-term goal and learn to differentiate abundance from scarcity from a different perspective.
- Learn the importance of thinking before taking action.
- Course provides lifetime access to course materials.
Course Duration: Self Paced
16. Welcome to Critical Thinking – LinkedIn Learning
Before getting into the implementation of your thought process into your product or work, strengthening your fundamental knowledge of critical thinking is essential. This course provides a foundational introduction to critical thinking and equips you with basic skills used to think through complex problems.
Course Highlights:
- Learn about the fundamentals of critical thinking.
- Learn the different ways in which you can think to solve a problem.
- Learn basic critical thinking tools.
- Practice by demonstrating your skill through teaching others.
Course Duration: Self Paced
