How It Works
Course outcomes
-
Describe key AI concepts and differentiate between traditional AI, machine learning, and generative AI in everyday terms.
-
Write clear prompts using a simple structure (role + task + context + constraints + example) to produce consistent results.
-
Draft, rewrite, and summarize professional content (emails, short reports, posts) using AI while maintaining your voice.
-
Extract and organize information from text sources and use AI to compare options and generate recommendations with caveats.
-
Evaluate AI outputs for accuracy and bias, and apply privacy/copyright best practices before using results at work.
-
Outline one personal “AI use case” you can implement immediately and identify next-step skills aligned to intermediate/advanced study.
Course objectives
-
Explain what AI is (including generative AI), how it works at a high level, and where it is used in real-world settings.
-
Demonstrate effective prompting strategies to get accurate, useful, and responsible results from AI tools.
-
Apply AI to common productivity tasks such as drafting, summarizing, organizing, and improving written communication.
-
Use AI for basic research and decision support by extracting key information, comparing options, and validating outputs.
-
Identify risks and ethical considerations (privacy, bias, copyright, misinformation) and apply practical safeguards.
- Prepare learners to progress into more advanced AI topics such as workflow automation/agents and AI-driven marketing or app development.
About Online Learning
How the Course Works
It is easy to participate in your online course. After you register, you will be given a web address to go to get into your online classroom. You will have a password and use your email address and password to gain access. Once inside the online classroom, here's what you can expect.
What You Will Do
For each Unit, you will:
- Access the online readings
- Listen to the audio presentation for the Unit and view the slides
- Take a self-quiz to see how much you have learned
- Engage in written online discussion with your instructor and other participants
For best learning, you should make one or more comments at 2-3 different times each day.
The content (readings, audio lectures, slides) and self-quizzes are accessible for the entire course, so you can work ahead, or go back and review again, at your convenience.
Participate When You Want
You can participate any time of day or evening. The online classroom is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are no live real-time requirements or meetings. You decide when you participate.
For the best learning, participants should log into the course on 2-3 different days of the week.
Discussion
The Discussion for each Unit lasts one week. All comments are made in writing and can be made at any time of the day or night.
Your instructor will log into the Discussion area at least once a day and answer questions, make comments, and respond to comments by you and the other participants.
We encourage you to make 2-3 comments each day to maximize your learning and enjoyment of the course.