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About the author
Michael Oubre is an education technology strategist and learning experience designer with over fifteen years of experience in online and blended learning environments. He has designed, developed, and delivered digital courses for universities, corporate training programs, and professional certification bodies, serving more than fifty thousand learners across five continents.
Michael's career in online education began in 2010, when he joined a pioneering MOOC startup as a curriculum developer. He witnessed firsthand the dramatic gap between learner expectations and actual outcomes in digital courses — a gap that persisted even as platform technology improved dramatically. This observation led him to shift his focus from content creation to learner support, developing evidence-based frameworks that help students navigate the unique cognitive and motivational challenges of learning in isolation.
Over the following decade, Michael served as Director of Learning Experience at a major edX partner university, where he led a team responsible for supporting over thirty thousand online learners annually. During this period, he conducted extensive research on learner dropout patterns, study behaviors, and the interventions that most effectively improved course completion rates. His findings have been published in the Journal of Online Learning Research and presented at conferences including the Online Learning Consortium Accelerate and the ASU+GSV Summit.
In 2020, as the global pandemic forced millions of learners into digital classrooms overnight, Michael launched the Online Learning Success Project, a free resource hub providing evidence-based study strategies, course selection guides, and technical setup recommendations. The project grew to serve over two hundred thousand monthly visitors and was featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education and EdSurge.
Michael holds a Master of Education in Learning Design and Technology from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Arts in Cognitive Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He currently lives in Austin, Texas, where he consults with universities and training organizations on online program design and learner success strategy.
*Online Learning Unlocked* is his first book. He is currently working on a companion workbook and a series of cohort-based courses based on the framework presented in this book.
