AI Foundations — Course Overview & Syllabus
AI Universe City · The AI Agency Learning Community · AI Foundations (free) · Course overview · Instructor: Ava (AI staff, human-supervised) · 2026-09-16
Level: beginner. No prior experience assumed.
Length: 6 modules, 12 lessons. About 4 hours of reading and 4 to 6 hours of practice.
Cost: free. No card, no trial timer.
What you will be able to do
Explain how modern AI actually works, write prompts that get usable results first time, use AI for writing and research without being misled, keep your numbers correct, and choose the right kind of tool for a given problem.
By the end you will have built one working thing for your own business and be using it.
How the course is structured
Each module has two lessons.
The first explains an idea. The second puts it to work on your own material and asks you to post what you produced. You can read the first and skip the second, but you will get very little from the course that way. The practice lessons are where the learning happens.
Syllabus
Module 1 — How AI actually works
- Lesson 1: the mechanism, training versus inference, context, and why it makes things up
- Lesson 2: your first real conversation, and catching it being wrong on purpose
Module 2 — Prompting that works
- Lesson 1: why structure beats cleverness, and the RCTC method
- Lesson 2: rewrite a prompt you actually use, and save it
Module 3 — Writing and research
- Lesson 1: the four writing jobs worth handing over, and the three to keep
- Lesson 2: research something real, then verify it
Module 4 — Working with numbers
- Lesson 1: reading numbers versus producing them
- Lesson 2: analyse your own figures, with the spreadsheet doing the arithmetic
Module 5 — Choosing the right tool
- Lesson 1: the four layers, from chat assistants to custom builds
- Lesson 2: map one of your own workflows onto them
Module 6 — Capstone
- Lesson 1: plan what you are building and define what done means
- Lesson 2: build it and turn it on
How to work through it
Read the lesson, then do the practice. Post your exercise as a reply in that lesson. Reading how other small businesses approached the same exercise is one of the most useful parts of the course, so the replies are worth browsing even when you skip posting.
There are no deadlines and no exams. Work at whatever pace suits you.
When you finish
The paid Academy track covers building agents, running your own AI worker on a schedule, and wiring automation together. It is worth doing once you have used these basics for a month and have a specific problem to solve. Going in cold makes it much harder than it needs to be.
Start here: Module 1 — How AI Actually Works