In January each year, Class Central publishes a list of the most popular online courses released by major course providers in the previous 12 months. The most popular course in the latest list turned out to be Google AI Essentials, launched by Coursera in April, 2024. More than 900,000 learners have enrolled, more than the combined total of all new courses launched on edX, FutureLearn, and Swayam in the same year. What’s even more surprising is that (unlike the vast majority of Coursera courses) you can’t audit this course for free.

Why the huge interest? Well, during 2024, Coursera offered free access to Google AI Essentials for anyone enrolled in any Google Career Certificate including the Google Cybersecurity Professional Certificate. More than 800,000 learners would have received emails inviting them to join Google AI Essentials for free. Incidentally, the first course in the Cybersecurity Professional Certificate can be audited for free and topped the Most Popular list of courses released in 2023.

What Google AI Essentials Covers

Like other courses from Google that I’ve done (Google IT Support Professional Certificate, Google Prompting Essentials), Google AI Essentials is presented by a team of professionals from Google. After an introduction to AI and its possible uses in your workplace, you’ll be introduced to many AI tools in the second module. You’ll have the chance to explore the uses of Gemini in Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, Meet, and Gmail as well as AI tools from other companies including Claude and ChatGPT.

The third module explains what AI prompting is and teaches several techniques for refining your prompts to get improved outputs. The importance of avoiding hallucinations and bias by using comprehensive training data and examples, clear prompts, and keeping a human in the loop are explained in module four. The final module includes practice using Google AI Studio and you are encouraged to plan how to keep ahead of the AI curve in the future by regularly setting aside time to investigate and test the latest tools and techniques. I think this is sage advice. AI is such a rapidly-evolving field that it’s easy to fall behind simply by doing nothing new.

You’ll earn a certificate from Coursera and a badge from Credly when you earn 80% or more in each of the 5 quizzes.

Practical Activities

In the past, Coursera learners have had difficulty with peer-assessed assignments. Yet, written assignments requiring research, thought, and organization of ideas can be far more effective learning tools than multiple-choice quizzes. Google has rather neatly got around this issue by setting optional guided exercises in each module so keen learners can do them and compare their answers with an exemplar. You don’t lose marks by not completing these activities, but if you took this course to learn about using AI, you’ll find them well worth doing. Several of these exercises involve interacting with Gemini (Google’s AI model), which acts as a coach by asking questions and answering your questions to guide you through.

Google appears to be making the most of these courses by introducing learners to their AI tools: particularly Gemini and AI Studio. By teaching us how to use them effectively, Google is encouraging us to continue using Google AI tools rather than other brands.

What this Course Doesn’t Cover

This course is an introduction to using AI tools, not creating them. If you’re looking for technical knowledge of AI, try machine learning, deep learning, or natural language processing courses.

A few months ago, I took the Google Prompting Essentials course and wrote a review. Google AI Essentials was released about 6 months before the Prompting Essentials course. This means I actually took them in reverse order, which doesn’t matter. There’s some overlap between the two courses, with Google AI Essentials taking a broader view of AI. While only one of the five modules focusses on prompting, Google Prompting Essentials spends all five modules comprehensively exploring a range of prompting techniques and their uses.

In Conclusion

This is an easy introduction to using AI in the workplace. You’ll learn how to quickly draft emails, meeting agendas, presentations, reviews, spreadsheets, and more. And no, I didn’t make a lot of use of AI tools for this review. I used Gemini to summarize the course syllabus and organize my thoughts, then went ahead and wrote the review with very little further AI input. As a writer, so far I’ve used AI mainly to help structure my writing and get started on an article. This speeds up the process whilst maintaining the personal touch.

What a pity Google AI Essentials and Google Prompting Essentials aren’t available to be audited for free!