Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities. Each university has committed $30 million to the effort. Harvard President Drew Faust and MIT President Susan Hockfield announced the initiative on Wednesday.

Harvard's involvement follows MIT's announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project to be known as MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students -- some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but will carry no credit.

But Harvard and MIT are not the only elite universities planning to offer an array of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced their partnership with a new for-profit company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital. Meanwhile, Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor who made headlines last fall when 160,000 students signed up for his Artificial Intelligence course, has attracted more than 200,000 students to his new company, Udacity.

The Harvard-MIT project faces some competition in the push to make high-quality educational courses available online.

The technology for online learning, with video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback, online labs and student-paced learning is evolving so quickly that those in the new ventures say the offerings are still experimental.