Professors Without Borders Think Tank

Are you interested in computer science and programming? Check out our list of free, online courses in the areas of computer science and programming from Harvard University. These short courses will present a comprehensive overview of key topics in the field and provide opportunities for skill development through distance learning.

CS50’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python

This course explores the concepts and algorithms at the foundation of modern artificial intelligence, diving into the ideas that give rise to technologies like game-playing engines, handwriting recognition, and machine translation. Through hands-on projects, you will gain exposure to the theory behind graph search algorithms, classification, optimization, reinforcement learning, and other topics in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

  • 7 weeks; 10/30 hours per week
  • Introductory Level
  • Certificate of Achievement for 161 GBP

CS50’s Introduction to Computer Science

In this course you will learn how to think algorithmically and solve problems efficiently. This course will cover: abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, web development, C, PHP, and JavaScript plus SQL, CSS, and HTML.

  • 12 week; 6/18 hours per week
  • Introductory Level
  • Certificate of Achievement for 73 GBP

CS50’s Introduction to Game Development

This course will examine how video games themselves are implemented and will explore the design of such childhood games as: Super Mario Bros., Pong, Flappy Bird, Breakout, Match 3, Legend of Zelda, Angry Birds, Pokémon, 3D Helicopter Game, Dreadhalls, and Portal. Through lectures and hands-on projects, you will learn principles of 2D and 3D graphics, animation, sound, and collision detection using frameworks like Unity and LÖVE 2D, as well as languages like Lua and C#.

  • 12 weeks; 6/9 hours per week
  • Intermediate Level
  • Certificate of Achievement available for 121 GBP

CS50’s Web Programming with Python and JavaScript

This course will explore how to write and use APIs, create interactive UIs, and leverage cloud services like GitHub and Heroku. By course’s end, you will gain experience in principles, languages, and tools that empower you to design and deploy applications on the Internet.

  • 12 weeks; 6/9 hours per week
  • Intermediate Level
  • Certificate of Achievement available for 121 GBP

Data Science: Linear Regression

This course examines how to implement linear regression and adjust for confounding in practice using R. You will learn how to determine which measured outcomes best predict baseball runs by using linear regression.

  • 8 weeks; 1/2 hours per week
  • Introductory Level
  • Certificate of Achievement available for 40 GBP

Data Science: Machine Learning

This course will examine popular machine learning algorithms, principal component analysis, and regularization by building a movie recommendation system. You will learn the fundamental skills of machine learning, such as training data and algorithms, predicting outcomes for future datasets, and controlling for cross-validation.

  • 8 weeks; 2/4 hours per week
  • Introductory Level
  • Certificate of Achievement available for 40 GBP

Principles, Statistical and Computational Tools for Reproducible Science

This course will blend video lectures, case studies, peer-to-peer engagements and use of computational tools and platforms (such as R/RStudio, and Git/Github), culminating in a final presentation of a final reproducible research project.

  • 8 weeks; 3/8 hours per week
  • Introductory Level
  • Certificate of Achievement available for 80 GBP