The main goal of this lecture series is to provide a brief introduction to the theory of higher operads and properads. As these informal lecture notes stay very close to our presentations, which occupied only three hours in total, we were necessarily extremely selective in what is included. It is important to reiterate that this is not a survey paper on this area, and the reader will necessarily have to use other sources to get a 'big picture' overview.Various models of infinity-operads have been developed in work of C. Barwick, D.-C. Cisinski, J. Lurie, I. Moerdijk, I. Weiss and others [1,8,9,10,18,20,21]. In these lectures we focus on the combinatorial models which arise when one extends the simplicial category ∆ by a category of trees Ω. This 'dendroidal category' leads immediately to the category of dendroidal sets [20], namely the presheaf category Set Ω op . A dendroidal set X ∈ Set Ω op which satisfies an inner horn-filling condition is called a quasi-operad (see Definition 1.14). We briefly review these objects in section 1.Properads are a generalization of operads introduced by B. Vallette [23] which parametrize algebraic structures with several inputs and several outputs. These types of algebraic structures include Hopf algebras, Frobenius algebras and Lie bialgebras. In our monograph [12] with D. Yau and in subsequent papers, we work to generalize the theory of infinity-operads to the properad setting. In section 2 we explain the appropriate replacement of the dendroidal category Ω the graphical category Γ and define quasi-properads as graphical sets which satisfy an inner horn-filling condition. This material (and much more) can be found in the monograph [12]. It is worth mentioning that J. Kock, while reading the manuscript of [12], realized that one can give an alternative definition of the category Γ. The interested reader can find more details of this construction in [17].