Great online courses you can try for free

There are so many online courses available at the moment, it's hard to know where to begin. That's why we've picked out our favorite picks for this week, all of which are available to start for free and online now.

1. CitiesX: The Past, Present and Future of Urban Life

This course is a great introduction to a social sciences study on cities--where you may live but never think about as a social, historical organ. For the first time ever, more than 50% of people worldwide live in urban areas. This course will give you an insight into the past, present and future of cities, focusing on cities around the world, including New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, London and many more. 

You’ll learn about the growth of cities such as Rome, Sao Paulo and Seattle, while looking forward to the future by gaining a deeper understanding and appreciation of urban spaces. This includes an introduction to pressing social and urban planning issues such as public health, transportation, gentrification and more, using interviews and insights from academics, policy makers, urban leaders and city residents to examine not just what cities are and have been but what the future might look like for urban life in the next century. Taught by Harvard’s Professor of Economics, Edward Glaeser, this course runs online over 11 weeks for 5-7 hours a week and can be completed at your own pace.

2. The Science of Happiness

Now more than ever is a great time to learn how to understand and cultivate happiness. This free course from the University of California Berkeley is the perfect place to start. What’s different about this course is its focus on the science behind the emotion. This course explores the roots of a happy and meaningful life, exploring how cutting-edge research on emotions can be applied to our own lives. The course focuses on a fundamental finding from positive psychology: that happiness is linked to having strong social connections and contributing to the greater good of the world (no matter how narrowly or broadly we define this).

Spanning the fields of psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and more, this course will help you tap into and nurture your own happiness through classes and interviews with world-renowned experts, including  Barbara Fredrickson, Paul Ekman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. This 8 week course takes just 4-5 hours a week of studying--while the benefits could be not only helpful but long lasting. 

3. What is “the mind” and what is artificial intelligence?

This course offered by UC-Boulder examines the ways in which our current understanding of human thinking can be illuminated and challenged by modern artificial intelligence and computer science. You’ll learn our idea of what “the mind” actually is has shifted over the past half-century,  with insights from cognitive psychology, machine learning, neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and game theory and where this has left us in terms of current research directions and controversies.

Pitched at a beginner’s level and taking just 11 hours total to complete, this course will introduce students to the Turing test, the history and current situation of attempts to create artificial systems that can pass this test, as well as the details of Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, among others. It will define and debate the boundaries of intelligence and the line between human and machine and how different understandings of thinking itself can lead to different definitions of problems.

4. Lessons from Ebola: Preventing the Next Pandemic

As you probably know, the lessons of history are key to understanding and improving the present. This free course on the history of the Ebola pandemic--what went wrong, how the virus spread and what could have been done differently--will give a unique insight into the current pandemic. The 2014 Ebola outbreak highlighted the fragility of global health systems in many of the same ways as the current situation and can be seen as an opportunity to learn lessons from the past. This course lays out the global governance structure and features experts, academics and health practitioners in online classes arranged over four weeks, which takes just 3-5 hours of studying a week.