In the scramble to stake out a leadership role in the world of online education, the University of California, Berkeley, is announcing on Tuesday that it is joining edX, the free nonprofit online learning venture founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Berkeley will be offering two courses, contributing new open-source technology and heading a soon-to-be-formed consortium of universities joining edX.

Berkeley’s decision to join with edX is noteworthy because of the university’s prominence, and because several of its professors have been offering free online courses through Coursera, a competing platform for massive open online courses, or MOOCs, created by two Stanford University computer scientists.

“Ultimately, our faculty will decide where they want to put courses up online, but we find that edX has values and methodologies very closely aligned with ours at Berkeley, so our institutional preference would be to use edX,” said Robert J. Birgeneau, the chancellor of Berkeley.