Berkeley Joins Harvard, MIT Offering Free Online Classes

The University of California Berkeley will join Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in offering free interactive online classes to students around the world.

EdX, as the nonprofit venture is known, was announced in December 2011 as an MIT experiment called MITx, an online program of courses with homework, exams and discussion forums. Harvard joined the venture in May and faculty from the three institutions will offer a total of seven classes this fall, open to anyone with Internet access, according to a statement today.