The Open Course Logic in Action
Johan van Benthem

Abstract:
What are the basic logical notions and skills that all beginning students should learn, and that might stay with them as a useful cultural travel kit for their lives, even when an overwhelming majority will not become professional logicians? "Logic in Action" http://www.logicinaction.org/ tries to convey the idea that logic is about reasoning but also much more: including information and action, both by individuals and in multi-agent settings, studied by semantic and syntactic tools, and still confirming to the standards of precision of an exact and mathematized discipline. Viewed in this way, modern logic sits at a crossroads of disciplines where new developments occur every day. I will explain the ideas behind the course, which combines predicate logic with various modal logics, its current manifestations and dialects in Amsterdam, Beijing and the Bay Area, and its future as an EdX pilot course.

Note:
This is an invited lecture at the conference "Tools for Teaching Logic" in Rennes, June 2015, presenting the open course "Logic in Action" developed at the ILLC, and used in Amsterdam, Beijing, Stanford and other places. We discuss the agenda change for logical basics proposed in the course, as well as other guiding design ideas. We give a critical evaluation including a report on some experiences that were made in using the material for various audiences, as well as the fate of the original aim to provide a free-standing course for on-line self-study. This text will appear in the "Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics".