Free Courses

Learn fundamental principles of architecture — as an academic subject or a professional career — by studying some of history’s most important buildings.

Learn about the Quran, the central sacred text of Islam, through an exploration of the rich diversity of roles and interpretations in Muslim societies.

Learn to use R programming to apply linear models to analyze data in life sciences.

Reimagine global health problems with some of the leading global health thinkers and actors through a case-based biosocial framework.

Join Harvard faculty in this online course to discover the physical history of the Jewish bible.

Explore China’s imperial period, with a focus on the Song dynasty and the role of the exam system in government.

Learn about the forces in American politics that seek to influence the electorate and shift the political landscape.

Gain critical communication skills in writing and public speaking with this introduction to American political rhetoric.

Learn simple graphical rules that allow you to use intuitive pictures to improve study design and data analysis for causal inference.

Explore the birth of modern China with a focus on the time between the fall of the Qing and the end of World War II.

Top chefs and Harvard researchers explore how traditional and modernist cooking techniques can illuminate basic principles in chemistry, physics, and engineering. Learn about elasticity, viscosity, mayonnaise, baking, and more!

This intensive course, developed by the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR), offers a comprehensive exploration of key topics in stem cell medicine.

Learn inference and modeling: two of the most widely used statistical tools in data analysis.

This introduction to moral and political philosophy is one of the most popular courses taught at Harvard College.

Explore the impact of the conquest dynasties and the world of the Ming.

Use the case study method to study China from the rise of Deng Xiaoping to the present.

Examine how great modern writers capture the intricacies of our globalized world and how their works circulate within that world to find their own audiences.

Explore what makes cities energizing, amazing, challenging, and perhaps humanity’s greatest invention.

An exploration of the magnetic and ambivalent character of Shylock in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.

Learn about the development of 2D and 3D interactive games in this hands-on course, as you explore the design of games such as Super Mario Bros., Pokémon, Angry Birds, and more.

Learn skills and tools that support data science and reproducible research, to ensure you can trust your own research results, reproduce them yourself, and communicate them to others.

Explore the reunification of China under the Tang with a focus on aristocratic culture — from poetry to calligraphy to literature.

Combine literary research with data science to find answers in unexpected ways. Learn basic coding tools to help save time and draw insights from thousands of digital documents at once.

Study Baroque and Classical opera through Handel’s Giulio Cesare and Mozart’s Don Giovanni