Hi. I'm Walter Sinnott-Armstrong from Duke University. And I'm Ram Neta from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Three years ago, Ram and I constructed a Coursera course called, Think Again. It taught students how to analyze and evaluate arguments. It taught them how to tell the difference between good reasoning and bad reasoning. Over the last three years, we've had a wonderful time teaching Think Again and we've really enjoyed interacting in the discussion forums with students from all over the world. We were extremely pleased with the reaction to our course. Over the past three years, over 750,000 students enrolled in that course. But, we realized that we could teach the course even more effectively if we made a few small changes. First, it wasn't easy to cover all the material that we wanted to cover in the 12 weeks of our course. Each week contained hours of lecture, exercises, and quizzes. And doing all those hours of work every week for 12 weeks was a tall order. In the third week of each section of that old course, we asked you to learn new material and then also take a quiz. Well, that's just too much. For these reasons, we decided that the best way for students to learn all of the material that we wanted to teach them was to divide up our original course into four much shorter courses. That way, you can take one of the courses, take off a month or two, take another course, maybe skip a course, we hope you won't, but do it at your own pace in the way that fits your lifestyle best. And that way, you're most likely to end up learning all of the material that we want you to learn. Maybe not this year, but eventually. And the material really does fit together. So even though we've split up the course into four separate courses, it's very worthwhile for you to take all the different courses if you possibly can. The lectures in the mini course that you're about to take now, were all part of our original 12 week course. And so frequently, you're going to find that we make references in those lectures to other features of that original 12 week course. For example, very early on I say, that arguments have a form or a structure and that we'll study that form or structure in future weeks in the course. Well, now that's in the second course, the course on deductive logic. And I begin the course in deductive logic by saying, welcome to unit two of our course. Well, I was referring to unit two of our original 12 week course. But now, deductive logic is its own course. And when I talk about weeks four and five, I'm referring to weeks four and five of our original 12 week course. But now, they're weeks one and two of the deductive logic course. We hope this is not too confusing but the basic message is really simple. Just ignore all of those cross-references to other parts of courses or other courses, just the same way that you ignore the wrinkles on an old road map. Hey, I like to use wrinkled road maps. Well, it's fine to use wrinkled road maps as long as you know the wrinkles aren't extra roads because then you're going to drive off onto them. So you're saying that the students can learn all the material that we want to teach them even if they ignore all of our references to the old 12 week course? Exactly. Sounds like a plan to me. We hope that you enjoy taking this mini course just as much as we enjoyed making it. And we hope that it encourages you to take the other courses in our Think Again sequence. And also to encourage your friends and family to take this series of courses as well, because it's a lot more fun to take these courses together with other people so that you can talk to them about the arguments you'll be studying. Thank you for listening.
