ABSTRACT
Stellenbosch University’s first MOOC, Teaching for Change, shared a pedagogical approach with the world that is based on an African Philosophy of Education. At the same time, it served as a flexible incubation space for different dimensions of professional and institutional learning at our university. The experimentation that the development process of the MOOC allowed in dimensions such as pedagogy, technology systems, and partnerships between professional academic support environments and teaching staff is informing institutional strategy and decision making regarding the use of learning technologies for face-to-face, online, and hybrid modes learning and teaching. Consequently, the return on investment of the MOOC in our South African, resource-constrained environment is not calculated in terms of short-term financial gains but rather in terms of longer-term gains that include organizational resilience and sustainability. This chapter indicates how the development of a MOOC generated the incubation of meaningful and innovative learning processes at different levels of the university. The authors insightfully note that the iterative process that they describe sparked valuable dialogue, leading to the purposeful application of learning technologies for a range of learning and teaching modalities. Such applications operated within a complex, emerging (South) African context that, importantly, were not limited to the MOOC format.
