Hacking COVID-19 — Course 3: Unraveling COVID-19's Origins (Coursera)

Hacking COVID-19 — Course 3: Unraveling COVID-19's Origins (Coursera)

In this course, you will follow in the footsteps of the bioinformaticians investigating the COVID-19 outbreak by investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2. Whether you’re new to the world of computational biology, or you’re a bioinformatics expert seeking to learn about its applications in the COVID-19 pandemic, or somewhere in between, this course is for you!

Class Deals by MOOC List - Click here and see Coursera's Active Discounts, Deals, and Promo Codes.

As you go through this journey, we will introduce and explain genomic concepts and give you many opportunities to practice your skills, and we will provide a series of problems with gradually increasing complexity. This third course will only discuss the multiple sequence alignment and maximum-likelihood phylogenetic inference of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, but future courses in this series will explore follow-up bioinformatics analyses used in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Go to Class
MOOC List is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Related Courses

Genome Assembly Programming Challenge (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, San Diego,Higher School of Economics - HSE University

Genome Assembly Programming Challenge (Coursera)

In Spring 2011, thousands of people in Germany were hospitalized with a deadly disease that started as food poisoning with bloody diarrhea and often led to kidney failure. It was the beginning of the deadliest outbreak in recent history, caused by a mysterious bacterial strain that we will refer to as E. coli X. Soon, German officials linked the outbreak to a restaurant in Lübeck, where nearly 20% of the patrons had developed bloody diarrhea in a single week. At this point, biologists knew that they were facing a previously unknown pathogen and that traditional methods would not suffice – computational biologists would be needed to assemble and analyze the genome of the newly emerged pathogen.

Oct 19th 2026
3 Weeks
Comparing Genes, Proteins, and Genomes (Bioinformatics III) (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, San Diego

Comparing Genes, Proteins, and Genomes (Bioinformatics III) (Coursera)

Once we have sequenced genomes in the previous course, we would like to compare them to determine how species have evolved and what makes them different. In the first half of the course, we will compare two short biological sequences, such as genes (i.e., short sequences of DNA) or proteins. We will encounter a powerful algorithmic tool called dynamic programming that will help us determine the number of mutations that have separated the two genes/proteins.

Nov 9th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Intro to AR/VR/MR/XR: Technologies, Applications & Issues (Coursera) Coursera
University of Michigan

Intro to AR/VR/MR/XR: Technologies, Applications & Issues (Coursera)

This first course in the XR for Everybody specialization creates a foundational understanding of the differences between AR, VR, MR, and XR. The course provides learners with a broad overview of the rapidly evolving XR space and the tools to characterize future XR developments and assess their potential and limitations. It establishes key concepts and dives into the XR device landscape, helping learners to differentiate current and future platforms and devices as well as critique the use of VR or AR in applications. The course pivots in the second half to look more at how to shape the future of XR, by analyzing trends and raising issues such as COVID-19, social and ethical concerns, accessibility and equity, as well as privacy and security.

Oct 26th 2026
4 Weeks
Big Data Science with the BD2K-LINCS Data Coordination and Integration Center (Coursera) Coursera
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Big Data Science with the BD2K-LINCS Data Coordination and Integration Center (Coursera)

In this course we briefly introduce the DCIC and the various Centers that collect data for LINCS. We then cover metadata and how metadata is linked to ontologies. We then present data processing and normalization methods to clean and harmonize LINCS data. This follow discussions about how data is served as RESTful APIs. Most importantly, the course covers computational methods including: data clustering, gene-set enrichment analysis, interactive data visualization, and supervised learning. Finally, we introduce crowdsourcing/citizen-science projects where students can work together in teams to extract expression signatures from public databases and then query such collections of signatures against LINCS data for predicting small molecules as potential therapeutics.

Oct 19th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Manejo del enfermo semicrítico y crítico por COVID-19 (Coursera) Coursera
University of Barcelona

Manejo del enfermo semicrítico y crítico por COVID-19 (Coursera)

Después de realizar este curso serás capaz de conocer los elementos clave del abordaje del paciente crítico y semicrítico por COVID-19, basados en la evidencia científica disponible y que puedan ayudarte en la toma de decisiones clínicas. Curso dirigido a los profesionales de medicina y enfermería, con conocimientos básicos en la atención a pacientes críticos y, que debido a la crisis sanitaria, atienden en las áreas de críticos o semicríticos COVID-19 y/o a estos pacientes fuera de su ubicación habitual.

Nov 2nd 2026
5-12 Weeks
Life After COVID-19: Get Ready for our Post-Pandemic Future (Coursera) Coursera
Institute for the Future

Life After COVID-19: Get Ready for our Post-Pandemic Future (Coursera)

The pandemic will create long-lasting and surprising ripple effects, even after vaccines are widely available. Are you ready for what's next? This course will give you a clear forecast of the challenges and opportunities you’re most likely to encounter over the next 3-5 years, as a direct result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Find out what risks still lie ahead; Make a plan for resilience; Play future forecasting games to stretch your imagination about what's possible; Build your post-pandemic confidence; Envision the world you want to live in when we’re all finally on the other side of COVID-19. How can you take advantage of this unprecedented moment of disruption to make positive change in your community, company or other organization?

Oct 26th 2026
4 Weeks
Health, Society, and Wellness in COVID-19 Times (Coursera) Coursera
University of Colorado Boulder

Health, Society, and Wellness in COVID-19 Times (Coursera)

You may be encountering a world unlike any other generation. The public health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has created a context of pervasive uncertainty, heightened anxiety, and social isolation that overlaps with a critical time of your own learning and development. The COVID-19 pandemic also has exacerbated long-standing inequalities and disparities, and recent events in the United States have laid bare historical and current realities of racism and systemic oppression.

Oct 26th 2026
4 Weeks
Genomic Data Science and Clustering (Bioinformatics V) (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, San Diego

Genomic Data Science and Clustering (Bioinformatics V) (Coursera)

How do we infer which genes orchestrate various processes in the cell? How did humans migrate out of Africa and spread around the world? In this class, we will see that these two seemingly different questions can be addressed using similar algorithmic and machine learning techniques arising from the general problem of dividing data points into distinct clusters.

Oct 19th 2026
3 Weeks
Reflections from 40 Years Fighting International Epidemics (Coursera) Coursera
Dartmouth College

Reflections from 40 Years Fighting International Epidemics (Coursera)

Reflections on patients, policies, pan-epidemics, prose and medical humanities from a 40-year career fighting epidemics around the world by an infectious disease public health physician. Examples include HIV/AIDS, Anthrax, SARS, MERS, H5N1 and H1N1 influenza, Nipah, Ebola (with MSF 2014), Zika, Plague (with WHO 2017) and COVID-19. Working side-by-side with international colleagues to provide hands-on patient care and to share stories is an expression of medical humanities.

Oct 26th 2026
5-12 Weeks
Finding Hidden Messages in DNA (Bioinformatics I) (Coursera) Coursera
University of California, San Diego

Finding Hidden Messages in DNA (Bioinformatics I) (Coursera)

This course begins a series of classes illustrating the power of computing in modern biology. Please join us on the frontier of bioinformatics to look for hidden messages in DNA without ever needing to put on a lab coat. In the first half of the course, we investigate DNA replication, and ask the question, where in the genome does DNA replication begin? We will see that we can answer this question for many bacteria using only some straightforward algorithms to look for hidden messages in the genome.

Oct 26th 2026
5-12 Weeks