AI Literacy for Everyone

Everyone is now expected to work alongside AI, almost nobody was taught what it actually is, and the gap between the two is where bad grades, bad hires and bad decisions happen. This course closes that gap in ten modules and forty lessons: first the honest technical foundation — what AI, machine learning and deep learning really mean, how a neural network learns, how a large language model reads text and predicts tokens, and how a frontier model is built from internet-scale pretraining through supervised fine-tuning to RLHF. Then the practical half: prompting that works (structure, system instructions, few-shot examples, step-by-step reasoning, iteration like debugging), the tools landscape (chat vs coding vs search, media generation, free vs paid vs local), and the everyday uses that matter — research, learning code, drafts, exam prep and resumes — each welded to a verification routine rather than a leap of faith.

The last stretch is the part most courses skip: limits and safety (hallucination, bias, privacy, academic integrity, deepfakes, the honest jobs picture) and then your own practice — workflows with humans placed where the stakes are, a prompt library you reuse, rubrics for judging output, and a short ethics code you wrote yourself. It ends with a capstone that is a real artifact, not a quiz: five AI use-cases you actually ran, ten prompts with before/after evidence, your verification checklist, one hallucination you caught, and the rules you will keep. The certificate is issued for that document, not for notes about it.

Who this is for: any student — any branch, technical or not — who uses (or is expected to use) AI tools and wants to know what they are doing when they do; placement-prep students who need AI literacy for aptitude rounds and interviews; working professionals who must supervise AI output rather than be supervised by it.

What you need: no mathematics, no programming, no prior AI course. A browser, and — for the practice lessons — access to any free AI chat tool. Everything else is taught here from first principles.