Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential
McMaster University · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by Dr. Barbara Oakley, Dr. Terrence Sejnowski
Personal DevelopmentHealth
About the course
Mindshift is designed to help boost your career and life in today’s fast-paced learning environment. Whatever your age or stage, Mindshift teaches you essentials such as how to get the most out of online learning and MOOCs, how to seek out and work with mentors, the secrets to avoiding career ruts (and catastrophes) and general ruts in life, and insights such as the value of selective ignorance over general competence. We’ll provide practical insights from science about how to learn and change
The dissent
The most-upvoted critical review (21 votes, 1.0★).
“I expected that I could learn something new from this course, but I found that there is just the same things taught in this course that there is in 'MOOC Learning how to learn'. As Prof. Oakley mentioned, you shouldn't learn something you've understood. It's a bad thing called "overlearning" since it would make me think that I can resolve any problem by what this course taught, but it isn't the case.”
Coursera's 4.8 comes from 13,255 ratings. Of those, 0.8% are 1–2★.
Starisk reads the reviews learners voted most helpful, and weights each by the square root of its votes: a review with 80 upvotes counts about five times one with 2. Unvoted reviews are not skipped out of laziness — by this model they carry no evidence that other students endorsed them.
That measures what the most-endorsed reviews say, not “true quality.” The rating distribution above is the whole population, so you can see the sample next to it.
Reviews read on 23 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗