Teaching in Higher Ed· Folge 592

Metaphors, Free Speech, and How We Learn, with Barbara Oakley

Donnerstag, 16. Oktober 2025 · 49 min

MP3

Shownotes

Barbara Oakley shares about her course, Speak Freely, Think Critically, and gives practical advice about teaching on episode 592 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast.

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Quotes from the episode

If you look at free speech from a historical and neuroscientific perspective, you can get a much better sense of people’s motivations and the continuing patterns that we see through history of people being really pro free speech until it affects them.

-Barbara Oakley

Really intelligent people find it very hard to be flexible, to change their mind.

-Barbara Oakley

Learning is hard. Your job as a professor, as a teacher, is to help make it understandable, to help make it easier.

-Barbara Oakley

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Resources

• Speak Freely, Think Critically: The Free Speech Balance Act (coursera.org/learn/free-speech)

• Sway.AI (swaybeta.ai)

• Barbara Oakley – Coursera Instructor Profile (coursera.org/instructor/barboakley)

• Learning How to Learn (coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

• Think Critically: Deductive Reasoning and Mental Models (coursera.org/learn/critical-thinking-deductive)

• Barbara Oakley’s Website (barbaraoakley.com)

• Barbara Oakley – Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Oakley)

• Academy of Ideas: The Hidden Neuroscience of Democracy (academyofideas.uk/p/the-hidden-neuroscience-of…)

• A Mind for Numbers, by Barbara Oakley (bookshop.org/a/79174/9780399165245)

• Retrieval Practice (retrievalpractice.org) (retrievalpractice.org)

• Obsidian (obsidian.md)

• How and Why I Use Obsidian, by Robert Talbert (intentionalacademia.substack.com/p/how-and-why…)

• SmarterHumans.ai (smarterhumans.ai)

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