AI Essentials
A working understanding of modern AI in four weeks
Dr. Ayesha Rehman
Professor of Machine Learning · Dean of the Academy
About this course
AI Essentials is the campus course for the one-month short course of the same name. Four modules, one per week, take you from “I use the chat thing sometimes” to a working understanding you can act on: how the models produce their output, how to brief them, how to use them with your own documents and data, and how to judge the result.
No programming is required. The one lab in the course is a short Python exercise that runs in your browser and exists to make one idea concrete: a prompt is a structured brief, and structure is what makes it reusable.
Every module ends with a quiz; the final assessment covers the whole course and unlocks your certificate.
What you will be able to do
- Explain how language models and generative AI produce output, and why they fail.
- Brief an assistant with role, task, context and format to get usable first drafts.
- Use AI to summarise, extract from and analyse documents and spreadsheets, and verify the result.
- Apply a privacy, bias and hallucination checklist and write a one-page AI plan for a team.
Curriculum
12 lessons · 2h 44m
- 01
Week 1 · What AI is, and is not
The vocabulary, the mechanism and the limits, in plain language.
- AI, machine learning and generative models in plain languagePreview16 min
- How a language model produces an answer12 min
- Check your understanding6 min
- 02
Week 2 · Working with AI assistants
Prompting as briefing: role, task, context, format.
- Prompting as briefing15 min
- A prompt pattern library for everyday work14 min
- Lab · Build a reusable prompt template30 min
- 03
Week 3 · AI for documents, data and decisions
Summarise, extract, analyse — and verify.
- Summarising, extracting and analysing documents14 min
- Spreadsheets meet AI: analysis without code12 min
- Module quiz · Working with information6 min
- 04
Week 4 · Judgement, risk and your AI plan
A practical checklist, and a one-page plan you can take to your team.
- Hallucination, bias and privacy: a practical checklist14 min
- Where AI fits in your organisation15 min
- Final assessment10 min