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

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

They’re offered by many platforms including Google, Meta, and X, and cover SEO, social media marketing, and more.

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