course may be one way of getting a return on the investment. Part of the dilemma around which future direction MOOCs will take, however, is that nobody can yet define whom exactly they are meant to benefit. Universities keen to entice fee- paying international students onto postgraduate courses by showing off their best programmes online? Students in developing countries hungry for access to first-world universities? Employees wishing to develop their professional knowledge? People lacking qualifications who want to use MOOCs as a bridge to higher education? Or hobby learners, who are keen to learn about a subject area in which they have an interest? Though they may be popular to start off with, MOOCs have dire completion rates, observes Brabon. For his vampire fiction course, that meant 1,000 enrolments and 31 completions. “And almost all of those had a first degree or had been educated to degree level,” he says. “So the MOOCs trend may not be opening up HE to sectors of the population it hasn’t reached to date.” “Learning online is a different thing, needs quite advanced learning skills,” confirms David Kernohan, progamme manager for eLearning Innovation at Jisc, a charity that champions the use of digital technologies in UK education and research. “With MOOCs, there’s very little support available: the student is dropped in and tends not to get any