research methods online course harvard

Research Courses

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Prescription Drug Regulation, Cost, and Access: Current Controversies in Context

Understand how the FDA regulates pharmaceuticals and explore debates on prescription drug costs, marketing, and testing.

Immuno-oncology

See how the immune system is being used to improve cancer treatment..

Clinical Drug Development

Learning about the process of clinical drug development has important implications for anyone working in health care and related sectors.

Cancer Genomics and Precision Oncology

Learn how cancer treatment is evolving due to advances in genetics..

Gene Therapy

Explore recent advances in gene therapy and learn about the implications for patient care..

Global Clinical Scholars Research Training

This Harvard Medical School one-year, application-based certificate program provides advanced training in health care research and methods.

Foundations of Clinical Research

This Harvard Medical School six-month, application-based certificate program provides the essential skill sets and fundamental knowledge required to begin or expand your clinical research career.

Discourse and Research Methods

Research conducted in the Doctor of Design Program (DDes) at the GSD spans a broad range of topics and areas of investigation that not only represent the disciplines of the three departments at the GSD, but expand into domains such as art, culture, science, engineering or sociology, to just name a few.

GSD 9691 ‘Discourses and Methods’ is a required course for first year DDes students. It involves a close collaboration with the primary advisors, and for that reason the course is only open to DDes students. There are two primary learning goals:

• Advance each student’s articulation of their respective research topic and problems as well as their associated research methods.
• Provide a broad overview of how research agendas are framed in many areas of investigation at the GSD, and introduce typical research methods suitable to contribute new knowledge in these areas.

All students will work on their own research design and, as the outcome of the course, produce a draft prospectus in written and in presentation format by the end of the semester. The overall goal is to provide all students a broad foundation in terms of discourses and methods, and contribute to preparing them for leadership roles in the academy or in other areas of society.

Please note that the start time of the class might alternate to accommodate different time zones.

Digital Humanities in Practice: From Research Questions to Results

Use data science to enhance your research.

Combine literary research with data science to find answers in unexpected ways. Learn basic coding tools to draw insights from thousands of documents at once.

What You'll Learn

From the printing press to the typewriter, there is a long history of scholars adapting to new technologies. In the last forty or fifty years, the most significant advance has been the digitization of books. We now have whole libraries—centuries of history, literature, and philosophy—available instantaneously. This new access is a wonderful benefit, but it can also be overwhelming. If you have hundreds of thousands of books available to you in an instant, where do you even start? With a bit of elementary code, you can study all of these books at once, and derive new sorts of insights.

Computation is changing the very nature of how we do research in the humanities. Tools from data science can help you to explore the record of human culture in ways that just wouldn’t have been possible before. You’re more likely to reach out to others, to work across disciplines, and to assemble teams. Whether you're a student wanting to expand your skillset, a librarian supporting new modes of research, or a journalist who has just received a massive cache of leaked e-mails, this course will show you how to draw insights from thousands of documents at once. You will learn how, with a few simple lines of code, to make use of the metadata—the information about our objects of study—to zero in on what matters most, and visualize your results so that you can understand them at a glance.

In this course, you’ll work on building parts of a search engine, one tailor-made to the needs of academic research. Along the way, you'll learn the fundamentals of text analysis: a set of techniques for manipulating the written word that stand at the core of the digital humanities.

By the end of the course, you will be able to apply what you learn to what interests you most, be it contemporary speeches, journalism, caselaw, and even art objects. This course will analyze pieces of 18th-century literature, showing you how these methods can be applied to philosophical works, religious texts, political and historical records – material from across the spectrum of humanistic inquiry.

Combine your traditional research skills with data science to find answers you never might have expected.

The course will be delivered via edX and connect learners around the world. By the end of the course, participants will:

• Understand which digital methods are most suitable to meaningfully analyze large databases of text
• Identify the resources needed to complete complex digital projects and learn about their possible limitations
• Download existing datasets and create new ones by scraping websites and using APIs
• Enrich metadata and tag text to optimize the results of your analysis
• Analyze thousands of books with digital methods such as topic modeling, vector models, and concept search
• Test your knowledge by writing and editing code in Python, and use these skills to explore new methods of search

Your Instructors

Stephen Osadetz

Faculty Director of "The Digital Humanities in Practice" and Associate of the Department of English at Harvard University Read full bio.

Cole Crawford

Software Engineer, Humanities Research Computing  at Harvard University Read full bio.

Christine Fernsebner Eslao

Metadata Technologies Program Manager for Harvard Library Information & Technical Services at Harvard University Read full bio.  

Ways to take this course

When you enroll in this course, you will have the option of pursuing a Verified Certificate or Auditing the Course.

A Verified Certificate costs $219 and provides unlimited access to full course materials, activities, tests, and forums. At the end of the course, learners who earn a passing grade can receive a certificate. 

Alternatively, learners can Audit the course for free and have access to select course material, activities, tests, and forums.  Please note that this track does not offer a certificate for learners who earn a passing grade.

Related Courses

Data science principles.

Data Science Principles gives you an overview of data science with a code- and math-free introduction to prediction, causality, data wrangling, privacy, and ethics.

Shakespeare's Life and Work

Moving between the world in which Shakespeare lived and the present day, this course will introduce different kinds of literary analysis that you can use when reading Shakespeare.

Religious Literacy: Traditions and Scriptures

Led by Harvard faculty, this course will help you learn to better understand the complex ways that religions function in historic and contemporary contexts.

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Online course: Introduction to Mixed Methods Research

Online course: Introduction to Mixed Methods Research – 12/12/2018

Session Dates: January 16-March 13, 2019 Application Deadline: December 12, 2018

This online, eight-week course offers an introduction to mixed methods research in the health sciences. Participants will learn how qualitative and quantitative data can be integrated to capture the perspectives of patients, providers, communities, or healthcare organizations to answer complex research questions. The course will also cover formulating research questions, collecting and analyzing different types of data, choosing the appropriate mixed methods designs, and interpreting mixed method research results.

Eligibility: MD, PhD, DMD, ScD, DNP, or master’s degree, with prior knowledge of quantitative methodologies (priority will be given to fellows and junior faculty)

Time Commitment: Online course work and assignments averaging two to three hours per week over eight weeks.

Participants outside of Harvard can take this course, upon acceptance, for a fee.

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Research Methods

Except where otherwise noted, this work is subject to a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , which allows anyone to share and adapt our material as long as proper attribution is given. For details and exceptions, see the Harvard Library Copyright Policy ©2021 Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College.

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Quantitative Methods Online Course

By: Janice H. Hammond

Quantitative Methods is an introduction to using statistical methods to solve business problems. The course teaches statistics from the management perspective and places special emphasis on…

• Length: 20 hours
• Publication Date: Oct 24, 2004
• Discipline: General Management
• Product #: 504702-HTM-ENG

What's included:

• Teaching Note

$75.00 per student

degree granting course

$150.00 per student

non-degree granting course

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• Included Materials

The Regression Section (#6012) is available as an alternative to the complete course. Please note: Faculty requesting the Teaching Note for this course should be aware that they will receive two download links - the first link is restricted/unavailable, but the second link will download the appropriate document. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Quantitative Methods is an introduction to using statistical methods to solve business problems. The course teaches statistics from the management perspective and places special emphasis on developing the skills and instincts needed to make good decisions and become a more effective manager. The course is set in Hawaii at a fictional resort hotel. Students act as consultants hired to develop statistical models to aid the management team in making decisions for running the hotel. Students use sampling and estimation techniques to determine guest satisfaction levels and they analyze the risks and returns in investing in a new business venture for the hotel. Course topics are presented in a highly interactive format with narrated animations and self-correcting exercises. Microsoft Excel worksheets are included to assist students as they work towards mastering the subject matter. The course includes pre- and post-assessments.

Student progress and test scores can be viewed online or downloaded to Excel format. Seat time is 20 to 50 hours, depending on the student's experience with the material. 2017 UPDATES: This online course now features a redesigned administrator section with significantly more information about student performance, randomized ordering of student exam questions, a Certificate of Completion for students, administrator instructions for uploading student scores into an LMS, and additional quality assurance testing across content and browsers.

Learning Objectives

To understand how to analyze quantitative information and make better business decisions.

Oct 24, 2004 (Revised: Jan 24, 2017)

Discipline:

General Management

Harvard Business School

504702-HTM-ENG

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