Swayam is India’s national online course platform, designed to support the country’s National Education Policy, which entails improving access to quality education in India. At Class Central, we’ve been paying attention to Swayam since the very beginning. It launched in beta in 2016, and has now reached over 56 million enrollments with over 5.2 million certificates issued. It’s been growing rather fast. Swayam offers courses in a wide variety of disciplines, including from prestigious institut

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

Although I spend a lot of time at the computer and have taken more than 200 online courses since 2012, I’m still learning how to make the most of generative AI tools. I’m not a complete beginner in the world of AI, but definitely need to become more fluent in its use. In this respect, I found Google Prompting Essentials, created by Google Career Certificates, very helpful. This course, released in October 2024, provided plenty of ideas for creating and refining prompts in a variety of situatio

Coursera announced job cuts on July 6, eight weeks after its merger with Udemy closed. The company didn’t say how many people were affected. The only number it gave was a cost, $8 million to $11 million. After digging around California’s website, I found that 59 people were laid off: 31 from Coursera’s Mountain View headquarters, and 28 from Udemy’s office in San Francisco. California only requires these notices for jobs in the state, so that isn’t the whole number. Based on what the two compa