Beginner level
No prior experience required
Teaching Problem-Solving and Thinking Skills
Flexible schedule
1 week, 6 to 8 hours per week
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*Proof of full-time student enrollment required. Acceptable forms of ID include a letter from your university’s registrar office or an unofficial transcript. Email your documents to learnlab-help@lists.andrew.cmu.edu.
What you will learn
- Translate complex thinking goals into teachable components and learning activities.
- Design practice and support structures for problem solving, critical thinking, and metacognition.
- Identify instructional approaches that help learners build transferable thinking skills.
- Evaluate learning activities for how well they support complex reasoning.
Course description
Problem solving and higher-order thinking do not emerge simply because content is challenging. Learners need instruction, practice, and support that make complex reasoning visible and teachable across authentic tasks.
In this course, you will learn how to design e-learning experiences that support problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, and metacognitive skill development. The course emphasizes how to translate complex thinking goals into teachable components, useful practice, and stronger learning experiences.
Syllabus
Module 1: E-Learning to Build Problem Solving and Thinking Skills
- Distinguish among three types of thinking skills: creative thinking, critical thinking, and metacognition.
- Apply thinking skills principles.
- Focus on job-specific thinking skills.
- Design whole-task learning environments.
- Make thinking processes explicit.
- Base lessons on cognitive task analysis.
Meet the instructor
Dr. Ken Koedinger
Ken Koedinger is the Hillman University Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, with appointments in Human-Computer Interaction and Psychology. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and has experience teaching in an urban high school. He has developed data-sharing and analytics infrastructures that support innovations in learning, including DataShop and LearnSphere, and has used them to improve learning as illustrated in his hundreds of publications. He directs LearnLab and co-founded Carnegie Learning in 1998, the first AI in Education company to bring intelligent tutoring technology into widespread use in schools. His PLUS project provides hybrid human-AI tutoring to middle school math students in schools around the country. He is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Association for Computing Machinery.
Where to go next
Designing Guided Discovery Experiences
Create guided discovery activities that help learners explore, reason, and learn with well-designed structure and feedback.
Active Learning: Practice and Feedback
Create evidence-based active learning activities by choosing the right types of practice and feedback for different learning goals.
Designing for Transfer of Learning
Design instruction that supports transfer of learning by understanding how learners apply knowledge across contexts, tasks, and representations.