“The reason Dartmouth is getting into [edX] is clearly not as a money-making kind of thing,” said Joshua Kim, the director of digital learning initiatives at Dartmouth. Kim added that the chief goal of the online platform is to gather large amounts of data that could potentially improve teaching and learning on Dartmouth’s campus.

“This whole online learning initiative at Dartmouth is part of our much larger effort to invest in our learning and invest in our faculty and leverage technology,” Kim said.

Lue noted that Harvard also plans to use data from edX to fine tune education for its tuition-paying students.

“We are very much committed to a recirculation of benefits to students on campus. That is a founding principle of edX, with DartmouthX as well,” Lue said, adding that Forum Academy uses a different model because it is not a traditional university. “For the [Forum], in my opinion, it is more about the ability to broaden access to a much larger audience.”

Dartmouth and the Forum joined the platform just days after HarvardX announced that it will offer a paid version of the online course “CS50x” this semester that includes online office hours with the course instructor, David J. Malan.

—Staff writer Michael V. Rothberg can be reached at mrothberg@college.harvard.edu.