Harvard Lets You Take 133 Free Online Courses: Explore Courses on Justice, American Government, Literature, Religion, CompSci & More

Image by Riz­ka, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In South Korea, where I live, there may be no brand as respect­ed as Habodeu. Chil­dren dream of it; adults seem­ing­ly do any­thing to play up their own con­nec­tions to it, how­ev­er ten­u­ous those con­nec­tions may be. But what is Habodeu? An elec­tron­ics com­pa­ny? A line of cloth­ing? Some kind of lux­u­ry car? Not at all: it is, in fact, the Kore­an pro­nun­ci­a­tion of Har­vard, the Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty. Prac­ti­cal­ly every­one around the world is aware of Har­vard’s pres­tige, but rel­a­tive­ly few know that you can take many of its cours­es online with­out pay­ing tuition, or even apply­ing. In fact, you can find a list of more than 130 such cours­es right here, all avail­able to take right now.

Those look­ing to start build­ing a base of tech­ni­cal skill might con­sid­er Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence or Intro­duc­tion to Pro­gram­ming (of which there’s even a ver­sion for lawyers). Once you’ve got a han­dle on cod­ing, you could move on to oth­er cours­es in data sci­ence or machine learn­ing and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

If your sci­en­tif­ic inter­ests lie else­where, Har­vard also has such online offer­ings as Fun­da­men­tals of Neu­ro­science, The Ein­stein Rev­o­lu­tion, and Sci­ence & Cook­ing for both physics and chem­istry. If you’d pre­fer to shore up your knowl­edge of reli­gion, there are also cours­es on Chris­tian­i­ty, Judaism, Bud­dhism, Hin­duism, Islam, and Sikhism through their scrip­tures.

Faith in art can also be sat­is­fied through, to name just a few exam­ples, Mas­ter­pieces of World Lit­er­a­ture (with spe­cial­ized cours­es in mas­ter­pieces mod­ern and ancient); the life and work of Shake­speare and such spe­cif­ic plays as Ham­let, The Mer­chant of Venice, and Oth­el­lo; pieces of music includ­ing Beethoven’s 9th Sym­pho­ny and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring; and cours­es on Japan­ese books and Chi­nese human­i­ties. But then, since we hap­pen to live in what the Chi­nese call “inter­est­ing times,” per­haps you feel a more urgent need to take cours­es on Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment and its con­sti­tu­tion­al foun­da­tions, civic engage­ment, the mod­ern media envi­ron­ment, and resilient lead­er­ship. You can even take the block­buster course on jus­tice from the polit­i­cal philoso­pher Michael Sandel: a huge celebri­ty here in Korea, inci­den­tal­ly, even by Habodeu stan­dards. Find the com­plete list of free online cours­es here. Also see our list, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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