In case you haven’t heard it yet: Harvard University is offering as many as 64 Free Online Courses to the masses!
Free Online Courses, These certificate courses by the distinguished Ivy League university are available on the university’s edX platform right now. The platform is brimming with courses that range from Game development to Divination and understanding Shakespeare.
We have listed seven free online courses from a plethora for courses available to help upgrade your resume prospects post-lockdown. Feel free to make your own selection here.
Here are the top 7 courses that caught our attention:
- Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies
This course is designed to help you explore how entrepreneurship and innovation tackle complex social problems in emerging economies. This business course takes an interdisciplinary approach to help you understand and monetise your decision in the current scenario.
Duration: 6 weeks (3-5 hours per week)
Course Link: Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies
- CS50’s Introduction to Game Development
In a quest to comprehend how video games are implemented, you’ll explore the design of such childhood games as Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, Angry Birds, Pokémon, Pong, Flappy Bird, Breakout, Match 3, 3D Helicopter Game, Dreadhalls, and Portal. This course is designed to introduce students to the principles of 2D and 3D graphics, animation, sound, and collision detection. By class’s end, students will have programmed several of your own games and gained a thorough understanding of the basics of game design and development.
Duration: 12 weeks (6-9 hours per week)
Course link: CS50’s Introduction to Game Development
- Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing and Public Speaking
This course will introduce you to the basics of making an argument and analyzing the arguments of others. This ability will help you engage in civil discourse and make effective changes in society. In it, you will learn to construct and defend compelling arguments, an essential skill in many settings throughout your personal, public, and professional lives. Through this analysis of selected addresses from prominent twentieth-century Americans — including Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Margaret Chase Smith, Ronald Reagan, and more, students will learn how speakers and writers persuade an audience to adopt their point of view.
Duration: 8 weeks (2-3 hours per week)
Course Link: Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing and Public Speaking
- CS50 for Lawyers
As per the website, this course is a variant of Harvard University’s introduction to computer science, CS50, designed especially for lawyers (and law students). It aims to prepare students to formulate technology-informed legal arguments and opinions and to equip students with hands-on experience with programming languages like Python and SQL. It will also help you understand algorithms, data structures, cryptography and cybersecurity.
Duration: 10 weeks (3-6 hours per week)
Course Link: CS50 for Lawyers
- Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science
According to the website, during each week of this course, top chefs will reveal the secrets behind some of their most famous culinary creations — often right in their own restaurants. Inspired by such cooking mastery, the Harvard team will then explain the science behind the recipe. To add to that, in the final module, solubility and the science of candy and chocolate will be discussed. This course aims to help you think like a chef AND a scientist and will teach you how to become an experimental scientist in your own kitchen.
Duration: 6 weeks (5-7 hours per week)
Course Link: Science & Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science
- Fat Chance: Probability from the Ground Up
This course aims to enhance your quantitative reasoning skills through a deeper understanding of probability and statistics. Through the course, you will also learn to burgeon an ability to recognize common fallacies in probability, as well as some of the ways in which statistics are abused or simply misunderstood.
Duration: 7 weeks (3-5 hours per week)
Course Link: Fat Chance: Probability from the Ground Up
- Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and the 19th Century Orchestra
Through this course, Harvard’s Thomas Forrest Kelly (Morton B. Knafel Professor of Music) guides learners through all four movements of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, highlighting aspects of symphonic form, describing Beethoven’s composition process, the rehearsals and premiere performance, and the work’s continued relevance today.
Students will discover the basics of musical form and analysis, the genres and styles used and the circumstances of this symphony’s first performance and subsequent history. The icing on the cake? Learners in this course need not have any prior musical experience.
Duration: 3 weeks (3-5 hours per week)
Course Link: Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and the 19th Century Orchestra
