UT.9.01x: Effective Thinking Through Mathematics Review

Effective thinking though mathematics is a course about increasing your ability to tackle new problems and understanding things you already know better. The course focuses on 4 main elements of effective thinking: understanding simple things deeply, making mistakes, raising questions and following the flow of ideas. Although this course has “mathematics” in the title, it is really about the process of thinking—math is just a convenient arena to teach these methods. You don’t need any particular math background to take this course and get a lot out of it, although be aware that most of the 9 weekly lessons deal, at least in part, with mathematical concepts like numbers, infinity, dimensionality and geometry.

The course format is a little different from most MOOCs: each week consists of a series of videos where the professor gives problems to students and the students attempt to work through them. The professor helps the students reason though the problems by making suggestions and asking questions and he periodically addresses the viewer, explaining how the effective thinking methods were or should have been applied by the students. The nontraditional course format may be off-putting to some viewers, since the students spend quite a bit of time struggling with the problems, making little progress. I found it to be an interesting approach, although increasing the video speed is useful for times when things get too slow.

This lighthearted course introduces some intriguing concepts and lays the foundation for approaching problems in a way that lets you gain new insights and deeper understanding. The main issue I had with the course that it did not provide enough challenging puzzles and homework problems for MOOC students to work on to apply the methods discussed in lecture. Everything felt a bit too easy. Despite that, this is a fun course that teaches methods that could be useful in almost any sphere of life and doesn't require a big time commitment.

I give this course 4 out of 5 stars: Very Good.