Orchestrating Shifts in Perspectives and Practices About the Design of MOOCs

The predominant approach to teaching is largely content centric with a focus on the understanding of the subject matter and not so much on its application. The first generation of MOOCs adopted this same approach and failing to live up to their expectations for optimizing the affordances of communications technology. There is a better way to design MOOCs, and this alternative approach is about starting with the learning context, and asking what is it that we want the learners to be able to do, and what are their learning outcomes. And then designing a learning experience that will be able to offer that internship in solving real world problems as part of their learning process. This comprises a radical paradigm shift in the design of MOOCs. But this kind of shift in perceptions and perspectives about teaching and learning will not happen easily without careful redesign of conventional choreographies. This chapter describes the development of this redesign process that is based on thinking around general systems theory.