In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

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, for instance, 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.

The technology for online learning is evolving so quickly that those in the new ventures say the offerings are still experimental.

“My guess is that what we end up doing five years from now will look very different from what we do now,” said Alan Garber, a Harvard provost who will be in charge of the university’s involvement.

EdX, which is expected to offer its first five courses this fall, will be overseen by a not-for-profit organization in Cambridge, owned and governed equally by the two universities, each of which has committed $30 million to the project.

MIT and Harvard officials emphasized that they would use the new online platform not just to build a global community of online learners but also to research teaching methods and technologies. Online courses with thousands of students give researchers the ability to monitor students’ progress, they said, identifying what they click on and where they have trouble. Already, a researcher from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, using the MIT Circuits course, found that students overwhelmingly preferred to read the handwritten notes of Agarwal rather than the same notes presented on PowerPoint.

Education experts say the new online classes offer opportunities for students and researchers but pose some threat to low-ranked colleges.

“Projects like this can impact lives around the world, for the next billion students from China and India,” said George Siemens, a MOOC pioneer who teaches at Athabasca University, a publicly supported online Canadian university. “But if I were president of a midtier university, I would be looking over my shoulder very nervously right now, because if a leading university offers a free Circuits course, it becomes a real question whether other universities need to develop a Circuits course.”

The edX project will include not only engineering courses but also humanities courses, in which essays might be graded through crowd-sourcing, or assessed with natural-language software.