About the course

Welcome to the University of Helsinki’s free massive open online course (MOOC) on programming! This is an updated version of our popular course Object-Oriented Programming with Java.

During this course, you will learn the basics of computer programming, along with algorithms and object-oriented programming through the Java programming language. The course includes comprehensive materials and plenty of programming exercises - all of which are tested using our automatic testing service Test My Code.

Anyone can join - no previous programming knowledge is required.

Unlike many programming courses found online, ours is completely unabridged; the course’s scope and material are identical to our CS1 Introduction to Programming and Advanced Programming courses.

This is the first course in our computer science learning track, and we use industry-grade tooling from day one. As such, the course is about programming in a real integrated development environment (IDE) instead of a browser or an educational IDE.

The course does not require separate registration.

Course Contents

The course is split up into two individual courses: Java Programming I and Java Programming II. Each course consists of seven parts, each with its own exercise set. Completing a single part takes approximately 5-20 hours, and we recommend reserving at least 10 hours per part, depending on prior skills with computers.

Credits and certificate

If you have a Finnish social security number you can get official study credits from the Open University of University of Helsinki if you take an exam after the course. If you don't have a Finnish social security number you can get a certificate starting from June. Instructions for the certificate will appear here later.