Several years into its hype cycle, AI innovations are still making headlines all the time. Most recently, Jeff Bezos teamed up with Samsung to invest $700 million into the AI chip startup Tenstorrent so it can compete with industry heavy hitter Nvidia.
Granted, AI is far from perfect, with critics calling out copyright concerns, environmental impacts, and executives cynically wielding automation as a threat to weaken the labor market. But if you’re just an average worker hoping to stay on top of the latest technology, a quick AI training course might help you upskill just enough to retain your edge.
AI tools are everywhere these days — and in some cases, such as the AI summaries that Google won’t let anyone turn off, they’re here whether you want them or not. Here are the most helpful, most interesting, and easiest free AI training courses you can check out this December.
Vanderbilt: Generative AI for Educators & Teachers Specialization
⏰Length: 24 hours
Vanderbilt University’s course aims to help teachers get to grips with AI tools.
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They’ll definitely already be familiar with the concept: Any teacher in 2024 has undoubtedly fielded plenty of AI-generated essays, or tried to figure out if a homework problem was solved with AI. Worse, these chores are even harder than you’d think, since even AI detector bots can be wrong.
Now, though, those teachers can “master techniques for using ChatGPT to enhance rather than harm education,” according to this course, which is led by Dr. Jules White.
Learners will be able to work through four modules, learning concepts and tasks including how to use generative AI to “amplify and augment your creativity and critical thinking,” how to brainstorm lesson plans, how to personalize learning materials, and how best to generate quick analysis.
The course is designed to stretch out over three months, although you’ll only have to complete two hours for each week across that time period — a fairly reasonable amount of time for a harried educator to try to slip into a busy work week.
You can check out the course and sign up over here on the Coursera website.
Microsoft Copilot: Data Science Specialization
⏰Length: 19 hours
Microsoft Copilot is the generative artificial intelligence chatbot offered by Microsoft since 2023, when it launched with OpenAI’s GPT-4 engine powering it. The tool can be used to “supercharge” your data science workflow by automating tasks and code-writing itself. But you’ll need to know how to use it. Enter this Coursera course.
In addition to defining key AI concepts and showing users how to get Copilot to help with basic tasks, this course will help users identify GenAI use cases in data science, whether that means working with data augmentation, feature engineering, anomaly detection, or generative modeling.
At a hefty 19 hours in length, this free training course is aimed at beginners, and can bring them up to speed on the ins and outs of the AI tool offered by one of the biggest business software providers in operation today. As far as upskilling goes, this will likely turn your manager’s head.
Get started today with this month-long course by heading over to the Coursera website here.
Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals: AI Overview
⏰Length: About 3 hours
Love Microsoft but need a shorter training course? Or perhaps you work more often with Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform, than you do with Microsoft Copilot. Whatever the case, this quick three-hour tour of the core concepts you need to know for Azure and AI is here to help.
It’s another beginner-level course, so you won’t need to worry about previous AI experience. Everyone who signs up can learn about core AI terms — machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing all get their own videos. You’ll also dig into the basics of less well-known AI concepts, from document intelligence and knowledge mining to clustering or the difference between binary classification and multiclass classification.
The final module explains how users can operate Azure AI services in order to build applications for themselves. By the end, you’ll understand how authentication works, and be able to complete an exercise by yourself.
Get started today: It’s all available for free on Microsoft’s own learning website.
LinkedIn: Using AI Tools for UX Design
⏰Length: About 2 hours
This course takes a look at how AI can help tech creatives working in the user experience (UX) design business. Eric Nordquist leads the sessions, exploring popular tools including Midourney, DALL-E 2, Jasper AI, and others in order to cover how each one can best be deployed during the lifecycle of a user experience design project.
Like many courses hosted on the LinkedIn Learning platform, this one is video based and, at a tidy two hours long in total, is very short. You’ll be able to dig in and wrap it up all in a single weekend afternoon, if you want.
For long-time designers who just need to pick up a “just the basics” understanding of how AI tools can help them, this course is a targeted look at the benefits of AI for UX. Once you’re finished, you might have more time for other LinkedIn courses — AI-focused or otherwise. You’ll have some time to chose from those courses, since you’ll be able to check out this course with a generous month-long free trial. After that, however, it stops being free.
Check out the “Using AI Tools for UX Design” course over here.
AWS: Generative AI Learning Plan for Model Builders
⏰Length: 15 hours
They can’t all be for beginners: This course requires at least a year of experience with natural language processing (NLP) and training language models both, as well as a basic grasp of Python language programming. If that’s you, you’re ready to learn all about how Amazon SageMaker can help you deploy your own small or large language model.
Amazon SageMaker includes distributed training libraries as well as access to another Amazon-branded tool, SageMaker HyperPod, which “is capable of splitting workloads across more than a thousand AI accelerators.”
Over the course of fifteen hours, you’ll work through four modules that offer an in-depth look at various language models available through SageMaker. One entire module, “Customizing and Evaluating LLMs Using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart,” is dedicated to teaching you how to deploy and examine existing models, giving you the hands-on experience you need to understand them.
By the time you finish, you’ll have completed tasks as complicated as demonstrating “the use of Amazon SageMaker-LangChain integration to build a RAG application using a Falcon model.”
Sound fun? Get started today on the AWS website.
Figuring Out If AI Works for You
Right now, many AI tools are free to use for anyone with an internet connection. Once we’re all hooked in the technology, however, monetization efforts might speed up. For now, millions of people are leaning on ChatGPT for help with their English homework or their work emails.
For the average person, it doesn’t take much AI knowledge to craft a few prompts that can shave a little time off their day. We’re still waiting to see if AI will impact the world beyond that: Artificial General Intelligence might, in theory, replace a human mind, but there’s no telling when or if that level of technology will ever manifest.
Until we know for sure, buckle down with a few AI tips and wait out the evolution of this new tech: Check out the best prompts here, try out an AI resume template here, or look into free PDF analysis.
Just remember to double-check your results: AI is a powerful tool, but it loves to hallucinate.
