Learn to use modern AI responsibly and effectively
A fully-free and interactive course grounded in real-world AI research and teaching expertise.
- →What it is: Short, weekly lessons (10-20mins) and paired interactive demos on how AI systems actually work and how to build workflows you can trust.
- →Who it's for: Everybody and anybody! No prior experience with AI or technical background required.
- →What you leave with: A critical intuition for how to approach new AI tools thoughtfully and effectively, the judgment needed to decide whether and when to use them at all, and a framework for expanding your abilities through careful practice from here.
- →Who it's by: Brian Heseung Kim, an educator and Ph.D. researcher who has worked hands-on with large language models and their predecessors since 2019. Through Open Augments, he now builds open-source AI systems and provides coaching and strategic advising on effective AI use for teams at institutions like Harvard University, the Urban Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, the University of Virginia, and more.
Course Introduction
No time to watch? Read the main bullets below
- →If you're a human being living on this planet in the year 2026, you're probably pretty sick of the hype and discourse around AI right now. It feels like there are exactly two camps of hyper pro-AI and hyper anti-AI talking heads relentlessly battling it out in the public arena at a pace that's basically impossible to keep up with. The reality, as with most debates related to any sufficiently complex technology, is that there are real, hard truths to grapple with from both sides of this spectrum.
- →There are about a million ways to use modern AI tools really, really irresponsibly and dangerously, AND ALSO similarly many ways to use it responsibly and well and in ways we should all actually be excited about. Unfortunately for all of us today, I think the vast majority of people testing out and trying AI have no idea how to tell the difference between those two things.
- →This course exists to help you, your coworkers, your parents, your friends, ANYBODY, start to build a critical intuition for how these modern AI tools actually work, and put together a well-informed framework for thinking about what they can and cannot do -- so that you can start to decide for yourself exactly whether, and when, and how to use them from a place of informed judgment, and in alignment with your own values.
- →My deepest hope is to help empower everyday people -- especially the skeptics! -- to actually engage with the critical conversations happening about the use of AI in our society, by sharing as much as I can of what I've learned and know so far, and helping people make sense of all the wild stuff happening right now.
- →I'm an education policy researcher and data scientist, and a former public high school teacher, and I've been working hands-on with these AI models and their predecessors for my research work since around 2019. When I started seeing how quickly my little corner of the AI world was changing and how powerful it was becoming especially at the end of 2025, I made it my mission to create tools and trainings to help people use these AI tools for good.
- →A big part of that work has been running workshops and trainings for nonprofits and universities across the country, including teams at institutions like Harvard, the University of Virginia, Northwestern, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and more.
- →I've spent months honing my training materials as part of that work, and I'm so excited to now be able to take everything I've built, and share it fully free for anyone to access, forever. The need for this sort of grounded and accessible guidance about AI is way, way bigger than I could possibly make a dent in going workshop-to-workshop, and I'm hoping that this course can help more people in more places navigate these crazy times a little bit more safely and effectively.
- →The structure of the whole thing is built around three core Levels of progression, with video lessons broken up into bite-sized 10-20 minute chunks at a time.
- →Level one is called Beyond the Hype, and it's basically everything I wish everyone knew before touching a chatbot. No coding, no jargon, and I really do mean this level is for everyone -- your boss, your mom, your most skeptical and critical friend.
- →Level two is called From Chats to Pipelines. And that's where we'll go from just asking a single AI questions in a chat window to actually starting to build multi-step and multi-AI workflows of your own.
- →Level three is called Getting Under the Hood. This section is designed to orient you to all the machinery underneath these tools, allowing you to take more control and customize how these systems work on a more technical level.
- →I'll also be adding in some more role-specific lessons based on who you are and how you intend to use this stuff. You'll also see these Interactive Demo sections, where you'll be able to jump into what I'm calling the Context Gym: an interactive tool I've built to help see these video lesson concepts in action in more concrete ways.
- →All together, if you've heard people throwing around phrases like prompt engineering, or context windows, or agents, harnesses, Skills, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, Claude Desktop, Claude for Web, Claude for Teachers... and so on and so forth -- and it all feels a bit over your head or muddy or hard to make sense of -- I promise, by the end of this course you'll have everything you need to start digging into all of it, and to actually put these tools to work for your own goals as you see fit -- IF you see fit.
- →I'll be releasing videos on a weekly basis. All of it's free and always will be.