A new, free online course has just launched on edx.org that will help thousands of students around the world get more out of their ongoing education. In just 2 hours a week, Think101x, taught by the impressive staff at the University of Queensland, will improve your analytical thinking and help you recognize when your thought process is relying on instincts, emotions, mental shortcuts, or stereotypes.

MOOCs (massive open online courses) give you access to learning far beyond what is available to you locally or at your MBA program – and edX’s courses come from the finest in the world, including MIT, Harvard, Caltech, UC Berkeley, the University of Queensland and others. Think101x will teach you to think better, argue better, and choose better by providing tools for how to think independently, how to be skeptical, and how to value data over personal experience.

This course will explore everyday thinking and touch on topics such as why people believe weird things, how we form and change our opinions, why our expectations skew our judgments, and how we can make better decisions. The course also discusses and debates topics such as medical diagnosis, paranormal phenomena, placebos, miracles, and more. One will learn how to evaluate claims, make sense of evidence, and understand why we so often make irrational choices. It will examine the mental shortcuts and rules-of-thumb that people use and misuse, and apply this knowledge to everyday situations to help make better decisions.

The staff of the course includes Jason Tangen, a Senior Lecturer in cognition at The University of Queensland, cognitive scientist and Fulbright Scholar Matthew Thompson, producer Emma MacKenzie. You’ll also hear from some leading researchers, whom the team interviewed for the course, including Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman in in economic science.

Think101x started 2 March 2014, and registration is ongoing. There are no prerequisites, and as an online course you can start now and study at your own pace.