Course Hero’s Education Summit

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Course Hero’s Education Summit

As you may know, we’re huge fans of Course Hero and its ability to help level the playing field for students.  (Barb still remembers flunking a test during her undergraduate engineering studies because she wasn’t in the elite clique with access to old tests that had vital information the professor hadn’t actually taught.) 

Now you have the opportunity to learn more about the latest in teaching and learning by attending Course Hero’s free Education Summit: What Matters Now? on July 28th through 30th.  

By way of back story about Course Hero’s positive impact on students, research has revealed that one of the best ways for students to succeed in their studies is to take plenty of old practice tests. In other words, it can be a great idea for you to ensure your students have copies of your old tests. Course Hero can help make that happen by cleverly letting students think they are in the drivers’ seat when they get old tests to practice with.  (Naturally, your tests don’t just have easy-to-memorize solutions!)   Remember that you can find plenty of ideas for new test questions on the Course Hero platform. 

Barb will be keynoting for the conference—more on that to come!  

Uncommon Sense Teaching Webinar

Enjoy yesterday’s live webinar, where Beth, Terry, and Barb discuss Uncommon Sense Teaching—the way the book came together, and the breakthrough insights it provides. (And a sneak teaser at the end about a big coming attraction!)

Barb with podcaster extraordinaire Nasos Papadopoulos of MetaLearn

Barb and Nasos are old friends, and so Nasos is able to elicit extraordinary insights from Barb about the historical clash of research titans that has led to some of the challenges we see today in education.  As you can tell from the show notes below, this is a not-to-be-missed episode of MetaLearn.

Show Notes‍

• Introducing Barb [00:37]
• How the pandemic changed Barb’s workflow [02:30]
• What are Barb’s upcoming books, Learn Like a Pro and Uncommon Sense Teaching, and her new courses, all about? [04:01]
• What does the process of making an online course look like? [05:39]
• Where do Barbara’s upcoming projects fit into her wide body of work on the science of learning? How has her work progressed over time? [07:46]
• What are some significant developments that have happened to the field of learning since Barbara started researching it? [13:59]
• Why are we seeing a decline in the practice of procedural learning? [22:52]
• Does B.F. Skinner’s behaviorist approach to learning restrict further developments in cognitive learning? [23:34]
• What was Noam Chomsky’s role in the cognitive revolution and in the discrediting of procedural learning? [25:58]
• Barb shares the most expensive yet unpublicised experiment in education, and how it captures the tension of opposing views in education [32:21]
• What has the pandemic revealed about the pros and cons of online learning? [35:28]
• Examples and opportunities of a low-cost, high-quality education [38:11]
• Closing remarks [40:52]

Applying Insights From Neuroscience in the Classroom

As Megan Collins notes in this article from EdSurge: “A deeper understanding of how the brain works can help teachers plan lessons that reach every student…Teachers need to know that both ways of learning are valuable and provide a deeper way for students to understand material…When teachers emphasize only one system of learning, as by forcing students to explain declaratively every step in solving a problem, for example, it can make it more difficult for a student to be a successful overall learner. We are hurting students who learn well procedurally.”

Launch School—and podcast!

Launch School is an online school for developers—they also put forth an excellent podcast about learning and the journey to mastery. In this episode, students Jenae and Mandy interview Barb.  

As Jenae and Mandy note: “The students are loving it. Lots of great comments in our community and here’s what some students are saying today: “Really cool to see that LS interviewed Barbara Oakley! Her course and the accompanying book were super helpful in getting me prepared for the slow path to proficiency four years ago and I still see the impact that it has on me today.” ~ Zac

Barb speaking in Rapid City, South Dakota

Barb will be speaking for teens, tweens, and their parents about effective learning at 2:00 pm MDT, Wednesday, July 21 at Freedom Fest. Come meet Barb face-to-face as you learn more about learning! 

French podcaster Céline Guerreiro and Barb

Céline has broken past her reservations about interviewing outside her mother tongue to make this insightful interview with Barb. It’s impossible to believe this insightful interview is Céline’s first in English!  

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Get the newest on learning: Learn Like a Pro!
• Get in early on the upcoming critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching!
• And here is the recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents.