AI Training Challenges
A professor recently shared with me that he was preparing to integrate generative AI into a course. Curious, I asked how he deals with the fact that whatever he tells the students about AI will be obsolete before the end of the semester. He laughed - “I’m waiting until the week before each class to put my slides together.”
Of course academics often navigate paths at the forefront of knowledge, but what about within the University administration? Staff and leadership at all levels grapple with how to figure out what they need to learn, where to find trustworthy training, and how to choose from all the possibilities. I’ve talked to colleagues and friends all over the country about this. Many companies and institutions have options like LinkedIn Learning, and company learning management systems like UC Learning. Searching Berkeley’s LinkedIn Learning subscription for AI yields more than 1,300 courses to choose from. (While in our own LMS, we have one offering- Berkeley’s AI Essentials training, updated last year).
So if you’re ever feeling overwhelmed about this, be reassured that we’re all there. My own learning path has meant ingesting research papers, watching countless Youtube videos, and reading hundreds of blogs on my own, over many nights and weekends (often to the dismay of my family). And building. For me, hands-on experimentation coupled with theoretical knowledge has been essential. After getting an on-ramp into basic fluency, you will be able understand enough of your own needs to sort, filter and curate options that fit your role, ambitions, use-cases and so on.
Last summer I started a post with my unofficial recommendation list for people starting out, which I just updated with some new additions:
- The US Dept of Labor released an AI Readiness course a few days ago aimed at people using mobile phones. SHRM has a writeup of it here.
- Anthropic’s AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations is still relevant – I like its framing for how humans can work responsibly with AI.
- Andrew Ng’s GenAI For Everyone Nov 2023 - despite its age, Andrew Ng is always worth watching.
- Jules White’s Prompting Course (Coursera) Another older one - but also look for Jules’ more recent courses including one on Agentic AI.
Have you taken a great course? Please share it with people in Berkeley’s AI Community. We’re now at over 1,100 members and your experiences and recommendations will help accelerate all of our learning.
Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash
