10 Free Certification Courses from Harvard University

Harvard University is known for its high standard of academic excellence and offers a wide range of free certification courses that cater to diverse interests and educational backgrounds.

These courses are designed to provide valuable knowledge and skills in various fields such as computer science, biology, artificial intelligence, business, and data science.

Harvard’s commitment to open education and making these courses widely accessible is commendable, as it enables anyone with an internet connection to have access to world-class education.

1. CS50’s Introduction to Programming with Scratch:

Course description: Scratch is a visual programming language used to teach programming to beginners. It allows you to write code by dragging and dropping graphical blocks that resemble puzzle pieces instead of typing out text.

Scratch was designed at MIT’s Media Lab and is used at the start of Harvard College’s introductory course in computer science, CS50. Students with no prior programming experience can design their own animations, games, interactive art, and stories using Scratch.

This course introduces students to the fundamentals of programming, not only in Scratch but also in traditional text-based languages like Java and Python. The course covers topics such as functions, which are instructions that perform tasks; return values,

which are results that functions provide; conditions, via which programs can decide whether or not to perform some action; loops, via which programs can take action again and again; variables, via which programs can remember information; and more.

Ultimately, this course prepares students for subsequent courses in programming. Course link

What you’ll learn

• Functions
• Events
• Values
• Conditions
• Loops
• Variables