Free Course · 5 lessons · ~3 hours · No background required
Understanding AI
A plain-language tour of artificial intelligence for absolute beginners. What it actually is, where it came from, what we can already do with it, what is coming next, and what it means for our work and our lives. No maths, no jargon, no shame.
Who this is for
You should take this course if you keep hearing about AI in the news, at work, and from family members, and you have decided to stop nodding politely and actually understand what people are talking about. Maybe you are a teacher whose students have started using ChatGPT for their homework. Maybe you are a parent trying to give your children honest answers. Maybe you are a manager being asked by your boss "what is our AI strategy?" and you would like to know what that question really means. Maybe you are simply curious about the most-discussed technology of the decade.
You do not need any background. No coding, no maths, no philosophy degree. The course is written for the smart, sceptical, busy adult who would like the honest version of "what is going on with AI" in three hours of reading.
What you will learn
What is AI, and where did it come from?
The actual definition. The seventy-year history — Turing, Dartmouth 1956, the AI winters, the deep-learning revival, the transformer moment. The difference between "AI" the marketing word and "AI" the technical idea.
What can we do with AI today?
The eight categories of AI capability that are real and working in 2026 — language, vision, code, science, healthcare, creative work, robotics, decision-support. With concrete examples for each.
The tools and the players
The tools you can use today (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Midjourney and many more). The companies behind them — the labs, the cloud providers, the hardware. The competitive picture in plain language.
Where is AI going?
The trajectory. What experts agree on, what they disagree on, and the honest uncertainty about how fast and how far. Agents. Reasoning. Multi-modal. The frontier in plain language.
What does this mean for work and life?
Which jobs change, which jobs do not. How to think about AI in your own work. How to talk to children and parents about AI. The skills that get more valuable. A personal AI policy for your own life.
What you will need
- About three hours of total time. Each lesson is 25 to 40 minutes.
- A browser. That is it. We will mention Claude.ai and ChatGPT as tools you can try in the optional exercises — free-tier accounts are enough — but you can take the course without ever opening either of them.
- An open mind and a willingness to ask "what does that word actually mean?" — both of yourself and of us. Where we slip into jargon, we will translate.
What this course is not
This course is not a sales pitch for AI. It is not a polemic against AI either. We will tell you, as honestly as we can, what AI is good at, what it is bad at, what is overhyped and what is genuinely consequential. By the end you should have your own informed view — not someone else's. The course is about giving you the literacy to form that view, not the conclusion you have to reach.
How this fits with the full programme
This course is the most accessible introduction to AI we offer. It is a taster of Tier 1 — The Foundation of the Integrated AI Program: 30 ECTS across mathematics, programming, computing essentials, AI history and concepts, and critical thinking — the year-one foundation everyone takes before specialising. The Integrated AI Program launches with the December 2026 cohort.
You can finish this free course without ever applying. We hope it is genuinely useful regardless of what you do next. If you do want to go deeper, the wrap-up page at the end will show you the natural next steps.