Class Central, yet again, came across a 2U employee’s layoff post on LinkedIn. This is its sixth layoff (that we know of) since 2U acquired edX in 2021. The first one happened in 2022 for profitability’s sake. Since then, the company filed for bankruptcy (mostly due to the debt it took to acquire edX for $800M), took down its bootcamps, exited many university partnerships, and even got delisted from the stock market. The previous layoffs were framed as strategy shifts, realigning operations, o

Although Class Central lists online courses in 87 languages, courses made in English outnumber all of the others by more than six to one. English is therefore a useful language to know, even though some courses have subtitles in a range of languages. Earlier this year, we updated our list of courses to help improve your writing skills. These courses all assume some fluency in the language. But what if you do not know any English, or your English is very poor? If you do not have convenient acce

Confession: I used to think critical thinking meant being skeptical of everything. Question every headline, every claim, every source. Look beyond the face value. But critical thinking is structured evaluation, and knowing when to accept a good argument is as much a part of it as knowing when to reject a bad one. The people I know who are actually good at this are calmer, not louder. That’s what makes picking a course tricky. Two courses called “critical thinking” can teach almost nothing in c

Online course platforms closely track their learners. And things have gotten worse over the past two years.