ABSTRACT
Humanising Healthcare’ is a free introductory massive open online course offered by the University of Cape Town in the interdisciplinary field of the medical humanities. The idea for the online version arose out of both an interest in building the medical humanities in Africa and as part of the bigger project of developing ‘theory from the global South.’ The process of filming each of the lecturers was interesting, as the online experts told us that the attention span for any online lecture is only seven minutes, so they had to condense what they wanted to say down to the absolute essentials. Putting anything online attracts an amazingly diverse group of people from all over the world. The online space is unexpectedly personal: online learners felt liberated to share personal stories of affliction and of healing in the context of the medical humanities in a much greater way than students on our face-to-face course.
