first-world teaching to students in less developed countries. But there’s cynicism, too, with the suggestion that universities could use MOOCs to advertise their on-campus wares to greater numbers of lucrative – though certainly not always wealthy – students from outside the EU. Mike Sharples, chair of Educational Technology, doesn’t buy into that cynicism. MOOCs are viewed primarily as a way to showcase and share universities’ best teaching talent, as well as encouraging interaction and soliciting feedback from students around the world, he says. He believes that recruiting international students onto university courses is only a secondary objective of running MOOCs – though they could certainly be a very canny marketing move, as he observes that “if 20,000 people sign up to a MOOC – well, you only need 20 of those to enrol afterwards to run a master’s.” Meanwhile, any politically correct qualms about whether UK academic institutions are patronizing developing countries by exporting small snippets of elitist education may soon be entirely irrelevant, warns Matthew Poyiadgi, managing director at Pearson VUE. “I believe we may get to a situation in the future where universities maybe won’t have a choice, and where British universities are saying, 'if we don’t have a presence in China, then we’ll get left behind,'” he says. “In South America,