GEN 202: Critical Analytical Thinking (CAT) 

Elevator Pitch:

• The Critical Analytical Thinking (CAT) course provides a setting for students to further develop and hone the skills needed to analyze complex issues and make forceful and well-grounded arguments. In 16-18 person sections, you will analyze, write about, and debate a set of topics that encompass the types of problems managers must confront. In doing this CAT will enhance your ability to identify critical questions when exploring challenging business issues. The emphasis will be on developing reasoned positions and making sound and compelling arguments that support those positions.

Founder:

• Stanford University – Graduate School of Business (2007) 

Key ideas:

• We help you understand what makes a strong, logical argument. Here, you practice different ways of thinking and hone your oral and written communication of analysis. You learn persuasion and criticism.
• Every MBA student takes the Critical Analytical Thinking (CAT) seminar, which focuses exclusively on building these skills. CAT transcends any discipline or function of management. CATenhances your ability to identify critical questions when exploring a new business issue, to parse issues, to develop reasoned positions, and to make compelling arguments.
• Critical Analytical Thinking (CAT) addresses issues that transcend any single discipline or function of management. In 16-person sections, you will analyze, write about, and debate fundamental issues, questions, and phenomena that arise in many forms in management. CAT will enhance your ability to identify critical questions when exploring a new business issue, to parse issues, to develop reasoned positions, and to make compelling arguments.
• The main points are to get students to understand what makes for a strong, logical argument (within a complex, sometimes ambiguous situation); to articulate these arguments orally and in writing; and to defend them logically. As part of the process the students also learn to analyze others’ arguments and to see points in common and in difference with them. Several of the CAT topics challenge the students’ notions of what principled leadership means. Real-life managerial decision-making requires choices among difficult alternatives.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• CAT at the GSB. Overview Guide and Example Assignments.

http://www.skillshare.com/

Elevator Pitch:

Skillshare is a marketplace of classes to learn anything (e.g. cooking, fashion, programming) from teachers in your community.

We are a community of learners: teachers and students fueled by common interests and driven by a passion to share real-world skills.

We want to allow people to create their own learning paths.

Founders (in 2011):

• Mike Karnjanaprakorn
• Malcolm Ong

Key ideas:

• “The people who use Skillshare are those who are passionate and curious about learning and simply don’t want to stop adding to their skillsets or banks of knowledge. Skillshare only features classes that are creative, not normally accessible (either because they don’t exist in the traditional education world or they’re just normally wildly expensive, i.e., cooking classes), and relevant to today’s needs.”
• Skillshare takes a 15 percent cut of the revenue teachers take in for their classes in exchange for the company’s hand in matchmaking students with teachers, and it just recently introduced a “schools” product to allow brands to market their own specialists as teachers for specific industry-related expertise.
• “We don’t really see ourselves as a platform. We see ourselves as a community–an alternate route to learning.”
• Vision from Union Squares Ventures and Spark Capital: “transform every community into a campus, every address into a classroom, and every neighbor into a teacher and student”.
• “If you could reinvent education for the twenty-first century what would that look like?”

Worth Reading/Watching:

• Why we are builiding SkillShare (2011)

https://p2pu.org/en/

Elevator Pitch:

Learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything

The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. P2PU - learning for everyone, by everyone about almost anything.

Founders:

• Delia Browne
• Stian Håklev

Key ideas:

• At P2PU, people work together to learn a particular topic by completing tasks, assessing individual and group work, and providing constructive feedback.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• Peer To Peer University 2010 (Vimeo)

http://schoolofeverything.com/

Elevator Pitch:

School of Everything lets you learn and teach whatever, wherever and whenever you want.

Everyone has something to learn. Everyone has something to teach.

Founders (in 2007):

• Peter Brownell
• Andy Gibson
• Mary Harrington
• Dougald Hine
• Paul Miller

Key ideas:

• Nobody likes being told what to do. School of Everything is here so you can organise your education however you please. 
• Connecting those who have something to teach with those who want to learn.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• School of Everything: eBay for knowledge (BoingBoing, 2008)

http://generalassemb.ly/

Elevator Pitch:

General Assembly is a global network of campuses for technology, design, and entrepreneurship.

We provide educational programming, space, and support to facilitate collaborative practices and learning opportunities across a community inspired by the entrepreneurial experience.

Founders (in 2011):

• Jake Schwartz
• Adam Pritzker
• Matthew Brimer
• Brad Hargreaves

Key ideas:

• The teachers are practitioners.
• Programs like GA offer a middle option: cheaper than a university but more structured than pure self-learning. It’s easier to teach yourself if it’s guided by some amount of personal instruction and encouraged by your peers.
• General Assembly is far more flexible than an Ivy League institution. It iterates and updates its offerings every few weeks, based on detailed student surveys. When its students said they wanted to study Android development, General Assembly ginned up a class two weeks later. A traditional college might take years to meet a new need.
• In the future of education, some General Assembly may be required.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• General Assembly Provides Entrepreneurial Skills To A Chosen Few (Fast Company, 2011)

http://www.academicearth.org/

Elevator Pitch:

A world-class education for everyone on Earth.

Online courses from the world’s top scholars.

Founder:

• Richard Ludlow

Key ideas:

Offering free online classes and in-depth online learning, Academic Earth brings courses online so everyone can receive a world-class education from the world’s leading scholars without being restricted by physical boundaries.

We focus on providing a user-friendly educational ecosystem where you can easily navigate through the free online courses to find the exact online class video to watch, interact with and gain knowledge from.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• How to go to Harvard for free (Slate, 2009)

http://www.perestroika.com.br/

Elevator Pitch:

Perestroika is a Creativity Activity School held in Brazil. It offers courses in fields where creativity is quite evident, or just as well, it brings a creative approach to more conservatives subjects.

The college’s primary objective is to offer courses that are fun and engaging as well as educative, based around Jacques Delors’ four pillars of education – increasing knowledge, turning ideas into activity, being a part of the global community and having meaningful experiences. Offering courses in creative areas, such as advertising, sports journalism and professional cooking, alongside more business-minded options such as digital literacy and consumer behaviour, the teaching is designed to be highly interactive, with the ideas of students being integrated into lesson plans as much as those of the tutor.

Founder:

• Felipe Anghinoni
• Tiago Mattos

Key ideas:

“Shouldn’t the school be a place more inspiring than it is today?”

“School should be fun. A hanging-out time. The student should decide going to the school instead of going to the movies, to watch a game, to have fun with friends. Never for obligation”.

“At Perestroika, we work with one goal: the course has to be a peak/one-in-a-lifetime experience. Most of the time, we acomplish it”.

“We believe we can help the world to become more creative, sensitive and a better place”.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• Perestroika - Introduction
• Perestroika - Experience Education

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/intranet/students/LSE100/Home.aspx

LSE100 is an innovative new course that introduces first year undergraduates to the fundamental elements of thinking like a social scientist, by exploring some of the great intellectual debates of our time from the perspectives of different disciplines. Focusing on questions such as ‘How should we manage climate change?’, ‘Does culture matter?’ and ‘Why are great events so difficult to predict?’, LSE100 students explore the different approaches to evidence, explanation and theory that are used in the different social sciences.

In this way, LSE100 aims to prouce students whose intellectual grounding in their discipline is complemented by an understanding of different ways of thinking. 

Founder:

• The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

Key ideas:

Understanding the causes of things

Thinking like a social scientist

Worth Reading/Watching:

• LSE100 Brochure
• A Guide for First Year Undergraduates

http://www.edxonline.org/

Elevator Pitch:

EdX is a joint partnership between The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University to offer online learning to millions of people around the world. EdX will offer Harvard and MIT classes online for free. Through this partnership, the institutions aim to extend their collective reach to build a global community of online learners and to improve education for everyone.

Founders:

• MIT
• Harvard

Key ideas:

“The campus environment offers opportunities and experiences that cannot be replicated online. EdX is designed to improve, not replace, the campus experience.”

EdX will be separate from ongoing distance-learning initiatives at both institutions, including MIT OpenCourseWare and courses offered by Schools at Harvard, such as the Harvard Extension School, the Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Medical School.

Worth Reading/Watching:

• EdX: The Future of Online Education is Now
• MIT and Harvard announce edX (Harvard Gazette, 2012)

http://ed.ted.com/

Elevator Pitch:

TED-Ed - Lessons Worth Sharing

Founders:

• TED

Key ideas:

The TED-Ed site is also home to TED-Ed Originals, a unique style of videos created by pairing extraordinary educators with talented animators to create curiosity-igniting videos for video-based lessons.