Abstract
This study explored the role of teacher empowerment and how teachers establish collaboration within online spaces. A key underlying problem is that there seems to be limited mechanisms pertaining to the promotion of teacher empowerment between leaders of the schools (principals), teachers and parents as well as external education stakeholders in South Africa. In turn, teachers are left disempowered which prevents them from promoting inclusive pedagogical practices. Also, there seems to be a lack of training for teachers to incorporate Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) within their pedagogical practices. MOOCs have been proposed as an additional strategy for teacher empowerment which offers flexible, open online courses to them. These courses also offer collaboration which is a support system for a participant’s overall experiences within the MOOC platform. This means there can potentially be a strategy that builds all teachers’ confidence and resilience to teach inclusively. A virtual focus group session consisting of five Northern Cape Education Department officials was conducted, including MOOC Web Analysis for data triangulation purposes. Thematic analysis was applied to in-depth interviews with 12 South African teachers who were interviewed about their experiences of collaboration within the online spaces as well as five local school principals. The findings influenced teachers positively particularly in terms of their pursuits of further studies. The recommendations referred to the improvement of professional ideologies that enable teachers to proactively address disparities that exist in South Africa’s education sector.
Keywords: Collaboration, communities of practice, inclusive MOOCs, teacher empowerment