Barbara Oakley

Barbara Oakley is an American engineering professor and author who teaches learning techniques drawn from neuroscience and cognitive psychology. According to Wikipedia, she was born on November 24, 1955, in Lodi, California. She holds a B.A. in Slavic languages and literature and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Washington, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. in systems engineering from Oakland University, where she joined the faculty in 1998. Her edX and Substack pages describe her as a Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Oakland University. Before her academic career she served as a U.S. Army signal officer, reaching the rank of captain, worked as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers in the Bering Sea and as a radio operator at the South Pole Station, according to her own website and Wikipedia.

Her online courses are produced by Deep Teaching Solutions, LLC, which Coursera lists as the partner behind 19 courses and 2 specializations with about 5.25 million learners. The best known is Learning How to Learn, which she co-teaches with neuroscientist Terrence Sejnowski of the Salk Institute; its Coursera page showed 4,184,921 enrollments and a 4.8 rating from 93,254 reviews when read on September 14, 2026. The catalog also includes Mindshift, Accelerate Your Learning with ChatGPT, and two specializations: Critical Thinking: A Brain-Based Guide for the ChatGPT Era and Uncommon Sense Teaching. On edX she teaches Learn Like a Pro with Olav Schewe.

How the paid offer works: the Coursera courses can be started for free, while graded assignments and the shareable certificate require paying for the certificate or subscribing to Coursera Plus, which includes these courses. Coursera shows prices according to the visitor's location, so this profile does not record a single US dollar price for them. The edX course can be audited for free, with a verified certificate for a fee that the edX school page does not display. Her books are sold through publishers: Penguin Random House lists A Mind for Numbers (Tarcher, 2014) at $20.00 in paperback and Uncommon Sense Teaching (Tarcher, 2021, with Beth Rogowsky and Terrence Sejnowski) at $21.00. Her website also lists Learn Like a Pro (with Olav Schewe), Learning How to Learn (with Terrence Sejnowski), Mindshift, Practicing Sustainability, Pathological Altruism (as editor) and Cold-Blooded Kindness. She takes keynote and corporate consulting requests through the contact form on her website, which does not publish fees; its speaking page lists events for 2026 including the GOTO conference in Copenhagen.

She publishes an email newsletter, the "Cheery Friday Emails", from her website, and has given a TED talk on learning. Recent interviews include episode 216 of the Mr Barton Maths Podcast (March 18, 2026) on AI in education.

Reputation: the record consists mainly of academic recognition. Wikipedia lists her as an IEEE Fellow, recipient of the IEEE William E. Sayle II Award for Achievement in Education (2020) and the Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education (2023), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2025). A Mind for Numbers reached the New York Times science bestseller list in 2014. A site search of ftc.gov for her name and for Deep Teaching Solutions on September 14, 2026 returned no enforcement documents. Enrollment and rating figures above come from Coursera's own course pages.

Not confirmed: the exact certificate prices in US dollars for her Coursera and edX courses, and a YouTube channel under her name, which is not linked from her website, so its audience is not recorded here.