12 free public health courses that award a certificate upon completion — from a Yale course on disease clusters to a CME-eligible course on COVID-19

Taught by Dr. David Boyd, an award-winning professor at Duke University's Global Health Institute, The Challenges of Global Health provides students with a concise but comprehensive foundation for approaching global health problems. The class examines what the world's major health challenges are, what contributes to them, and what we can do to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities.

This course features insight directly from experts about the theory behind the analysis of COVID-19 and its spread, as well as how to interpret new information using core principles of public health, epidemiology, medicine, health economics, and social science.

Students will be able to watch regular situation reports about the state of the epidemic, provided by the researchers of J-IDEA and its director, Professor Neil Ferguson.

This Johns Hopkins University course teaches students what a disease cluster is and how it is studied, including the challenges posed in studying disease clusters. The course's goal is to empower community scientists and to build better relationships between communities and health officials.

In this course, students learn about the role that the environment plays in disease transmission and how to implement standard and transmission-based precautions to prevent the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and other infections in elderly care facilities.

This course introduces a basic framework of concepts and principles of communication during a global crisis or emergency including why such communication is different, and the importance of adapting emergency messages to the needs of affected populations.

Students will use sample scenarios to identify information needs and develop useful messages that communicate effectively and promote behaviors that reduce health risks during an emergency.

"Communicating During Global Emergencies" was designed in collaboration with the Emory Rollins School of Public Health and the CDC's Division of Global Health Protection, Emergency Response, and Recovery Branch.

This course is best for proactive people looking to improve their disaster readiness and survival planning. The course will introduce the disaster cycle and specifically focus on mitigation and recovery phases. Students will create an extensive personal preparedness plan in the absence of resources like food, water, shelter, and communication.

This course tries to answer the question: what can we do to prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases from becoming epidemics or pandemic?

Students will learn about infectious diseases and medical responses, focusing on public health laws and policies that provide the framework for effective prevention like quarantine laws, drug development policies, and bioterrorism and biodefense.

Yale's comprehensive Essentials of Global Health course takes a global perspective but emphasizes low- and middle-income countries, the health of the poor, and health disparities.

Students will pay particular attention to issues within health systems, the links between health and development, and health matters related to global interdependence.

The course will primarily be structured around five questions: What do people get sick, disabled, and die from? Why do they suffer from these conditions? Which people are most affected? Why should we care about such concerns? What can be done to address key health issues, hopefully at least cost, as fast as possible, and in sustainable ways?

This course explores public health issues like cardiovascular and infectious diseases, both locally and globally, through the perspective of epidemiology.

Osmosis, a medical education site founded by former Johns Hopkins medical students, created this CME-eligible course for COVID-19. It's regularly updated with current information about the novel coronavirus and aggregates information issued by the CDC, WHO, and other leading agencies. The class covers the basics, as well as personal protective equipment, diagnostics, and other related material. Healthcare professionals can earn CME credit.