﻿“There are certainly MOOC junkies, who take them for no other reason than they’re free and they like hanging out,” grins Dr Ben Brabon of Edgehill University, whose massive open online course in vampire fiction is one of only two accredited MOOCs currently on offer in the UK. Brabon isn’t denigrating people who enrol on MOOC courses: he’s simply pointing out the motivation that prompts certain individuals to sign up. When a course is open entry – MOOCs have no enrolment criteria and no fees to pay – then participants are going to behave very differently from students in a traditional higher education setting. 
MOOCs are the newest big thing in the quest to enable higher education for all. A great deal of venture capital money is being invested in the emerging online platforms, which enable the delivery of increasingly sophisticated and interactive course content to participants who can number in the hundreds to the tens of thousands. For these investors, the Holy Grail is to find a business model for MOOCs that will make them profitable – so far, courses have depended on universities being prepared to bankroll their star lecturers’ curriculum design and online teaching time. Mining the data captured about how, why and when millions of participants opt to sign up, interact with their material, submit their assignments, message each other and drop out of the 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 individual attention. This is, instead, approximated by peer support such as online discussion forums.” While this may mean that online study is unattractive or difficult for someone without high-level qualifications, it does, he says, suggest that MOOCs could be “a really good tool for continuing education.”