Dr. Barbara Oakley’s Talk

Using Neuroscientific Insights Drawn from Movie-Making to Improve Online Teaching and Help Students Make Motivational Shifts in Their Identity

A world of neuroscientific insight has evolved around research into how movies draw our attention and communicate their key elements. Yet this insight has only sparsely been applied to teaching online. This talk will describe mental models, neural schemas, and how good online teaching, informed by insights drawn by neuroscientists from the analysis of movies, allows the efficient transfer of ideas from teacher to student. Neuroscientific insights drawn from movie-making can also help us with one of education’s foundational challenges­: helping students make motivational shifts in their identity.

About Dr. Barbara Oakley

Barbara Oakley is a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Her work focuses on the complex relationship between neuroscience and social behavior. She created and teaches Coursera’s Learning How to Learn, one of the world’s most popular massive open online courses (MOOCs) with over four million registered students, along with other popular MOOCs that have made “Top MOOCs of All Time” lists. Barb is a New York Times best-selling author who has published in outlets as varied as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Her book A Mind for Numbers has sold over a million copies worldwide. She is a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.


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