The opportunity for online learning in India is huge and the government has set a clear direction with Digital India, says Anant Agarwal edX and a professor at MIT. On Friday, Bennett University, a Times Group initiative, and edX signed a collaborative agreement under which edX will be the preferred worldwide provider of massive open online courses (MOOCs) to Bennett University. India is the secondbiggest market for edX after the United States, accounting for 700,000 of its six million students worldwide. In an interview to ET, Agarwal talks about the recent innovations in MOOC and the big changes and innovations it is seeing. Edited excerpts:MOOCs was earlier about creating individual courses in many areas and people could take them for free. Today, we have broken through in many major dimensions. One big example is today we offer complete programmes, not just individual courses, and we have also made a breakthrough with offering programme credit and certificates. For example, we launched a major data science programme with Columbia University. So, imagine, if you are student or working with a company you can complete a whole programme with edX in data science.There is a free option; if you do that you have the option of looking for a job in data science. Usually each programme is three-six courses and each course is about 10 months. Some of them have virtual proctored exams. We recently launched aprogramme with MIT in supply chain management with virtually proctored exams and students who pass that will earn the credit of a micro masters credential from MIT. We are launching a computer science programme from IIT Bombay and a business programme from IIM Bangalore in the next week or two. So right now you can learn anything on MOOC for free, but if you want a micro masters credential, you have to pay a fee of $200-300 for the entire programme.Course completion used to be a problem when we had plain vanilla courses. The pass rate used to be about 6%. But today, when people sign up for a certificate, the pass rate has shot up to 60%. So that is not a problem anymore.The opportunity for online learning in India is huge. The government has set a clear direction with Digital India. We have launched a course on scratch programming that relates very closely to Digital India programme of (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi and girl child education. It is a foundational course on programming and students who are even 5-10 can take that basic programming. Digital India will not be great unless women have access to engineering education.The big next step for us is credit where many of our courses offer credit and we have got some pilots ongoing. You take the courses on edX and if you pass you get credit from a university. For example, we launched global freshman academy with Arizona University on edX. Today, if I am a high school or college student I can take full first year of college on edX and can get credit at Arizona State University. The future is where I can take online courses and I can take campus courses and I can together collect the credit.We are also bringing social and collaborative learning into MOOC. We have seen that people who do a MOOC together in a small group have a higher success rate than if they take it as a MOOC. We launched a feature on edX called teams where a student taking a MOOC can invite their friends and up to 10 people can sign up as a team and they get a private discussion area and social persona. Currently, we are testing this ‘Teams’ feature in a course called social learning. It is called a GROOC and we will now be making it available in all our courses. We also made lot of progress on preventing cheating – one is randomised problems and second is virtual proctoring.