Harvard, MIT venture in free online education

Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to launch non-profit joint venture to provide free online classes to commence this fall season. 

Harvard and MIT will each chip in US$30 million to launch the non-profit, called edX, which has developed an open-source platform for online education.
 
Modern technology such as the Internet, cloud computing, machine learning facilitate online education on a massive scale worldwide. 
 
The free online courses will range from humanities to social and natural sciences, and will include video lectures, quizzes and automated grading, online labs, student-discussion forums and certificates for students who complete and pass the courses.
 
Harvard and MIT hope other universities will join them in offering free online courses on the their edX open source platform. // Nature News Blog