Generative AI is rapidly becoming an essential tool for streamlining work and solving complex challenges. However, knowing how to use GenAI effectively isn’t always obvious. That’s where Google Prompting Essentials comes in. This course will teach you to write clear and specific instructions—known as prompts—for AI. Once you can prompt well, you can unlock generative AI’s potential more fully.
Launched in April, Google Prompting Essentials has become the most popular GenAI course offered on Coursera. The course itself is divided into four modules. First, “Start Writing Prompts Like a Pro” will teach you a 5‑step method for crafting effective prompts. (Watch the video from Module 1 above, and more videos here.) With the second module, “Design Prompts for Everyday Work Tasks,” you will learn how to use AI to draft emails, brainstorm ideas, and summarize documents. The third module, “Speed Up Data Analysis and Presentation Building,” teaches techniques for uncovering insights in data, visualizing results, and preparing presentations. The final module, “Use AI as a Creative or Expert Partner,” explores advanced techniques such as prompt chaining and multimodal prompting. Plus, you will “create a personalized AI agent to role-play conversations and provide expert feedback.”
Offered on the Coursera platform, Google Prompting Essentials costs $49. Once you complete the course, you will receive a certificate from Google to share with your network and employer. Better yet, you will understand how to make GenAI a more useful tool in your life and work. Enroll here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
In 2023, Google launched several online certificate programs designed to help students land an entry-level job, without necessarily having a college degree. This includes a certificate program focused on Cybersecurity, a field that stands poised to grow as companies become more digital and face mounting cyberattacks.
Understand the importance of cybersecurity practices and their impact for organizations.
Identify common risks, threats, and vulnerabilities, as well as techniques to mitigate them.
Protect networks, devices, people, and data from unauthorized access and cyberattacks using Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools.
Gain hands-on experience with Python, Linux, and SQL.
The Cybersecurity Professional Certificate also now includes six new videos that explain how to use AI in cybersecurity. The videos cover everything from using artificial intelligence to help identify bugs and system vulnerabilities, to refining code and prioritizing alerts with AI.
Students can take individual courses in these professional certificate programs for free. (Above, you can watch a video from the first course in the cybersecurity certificate program, entitled “Foundations of Cybersecurity.”) However, if you would like to receive a certificate, Coursera will charge $49 per month (after an initial 7‑day free trial period). That means that the Cybersecurity Professional Certificate, designed to be completed in 6 months, will cost roughly $300 in total.
Once students complete the cybersecurity certificate, they can add the credential to their LinkedIn profile, resume, or CV. As a perk, students in the U.S. can also connect with 150+employers (e.g., American Express, Colgate-Palmolive, T‑Mobile, Walmart, and Google) who have pledged to consider certificate holders for open positions. According to Coursera, this certificate can prepare students to become an entry-level “cybersecurity analyst and SOC (security operations center) analyst.”
You can start a 7‑day free trial of the Cybersecurity Professional Certificatehere. Alternatively, if you sign up for Coursera Plus, whose price has been reduced by 40% until December 2, 2024, you can enroll in the cybersecurity certificate program at no charge. Find out more here.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
Back in 2021, Google released a series of certificate programs, including one focused on Project Management. Designed to give students “an immersive understanding of the practices and skills needed to succeed in an entry-level project management role,” the certificate program features six courses overall, including:
Foundations of Project Management
Project Initiation: Starting a Successful Project
Project Planning: Putting It All Together
Project Execution: Running the Project
Agile Project Management
Capstone: Applying Project Management in the Real World
More than 1.7 million people have since enrolled in the course sequence. And Google has now updated the courses with 6 new videos on how to use AI in project management. The videos will teach students how to boost project management skills with AI, identify potential project risks with gen AI, use AI to improve project communications, and more.
The Project Management program takes about six months to complete (assuming you put in 10 hours per week), and it should cost about $300 in total. Following a 7‑day free trial, students will be charged $49 per month until they complete the program.
All Google career courses are hosted on the Coursera platform. Finally, it’s worth mentioning that anyone who enrolls in this certificate before November 30, 2024 will get access to Google AI Essentials at no cost.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
This week, Google announced the launch of Google AI Essentials, a new self-paced course designed to help people learn AI skills that can boost their productivity. Taught by Google’s AI experts, and assuming no prior knowledge of programming, the course ventures to show students how to “use AI in the real world,” with an emphasis on helping students:
Develop ideas and content. If you’re stuck at the beginning of a project, use AI tools to help you brainstorm new ideas. In the course, you’ll use a conversational AI tool to generate concepts for a product and develop a presentation to pitch the product.
Make more informed decisions. Let’s say you’re planning an event. AI tools can help you research the best location to host it based on your criteria. You can also use AI to help you come up with a tagline or slogan.
Speed up daily work tasks. Clear out that inbox faster using AI to help you summarize emails and draft responses.
Google AI Essentials features five modules (the video above comes from Module 1) and takes about 9 hours to complete. The tuition is currently set at $49, and those who complete the course will earn a Google certificate that they can share with their professional network.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
FYI. Google and MIT RAISE have partnered to create a free course for teachers and educators, one designed to show teachers how they can use generative AI tools to save “time on everyday tasks, personaliz[e] instruction to meet student needs, and enhanc[e] lessons and activities in creative ways.” According to the course description, in this two-hour self-paced course, teachers can learn how to use generative AI tools to:
Create engaging lesson plans and materials. For example with generative AI, they can input their specific lesson plan and tailor it to student interests like explaining science using sports analogies.
Tailor instruction for different abilities. Imagine a teacher who has 25 or 30 kids in their classroom. With generative AI, that teacher can easily modify the same lesson for different reading levels in their class.
Save time on everyday tasks like drafting emails and other correspondence. For instance, if a student is out sick teachers can create summaries of that day’s lessons to help make sure the student doesn’t fall behind.
For those teachers who complete the course, they will “earn a certificate that they can present to their district for professional development (PD) credit, depending on district and state requirements.” Sign up for the course here.
We hereby announce that we’re switching our settings and allegiance to New Tab with MoMA.
After installing this extension, you’ll be treated to a new work of modern and contemporary art from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection whenever you open a new tab in Chrome.
If you can steal a few minutes, click whatever image comes up to explore the work in greater depth with a curator’s description, links to other works in the collection by the same artist, and in some cases installation views, interviews and/or audio segments.
Expect a few gift shop heavy hitters like Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, but also lesser known works not currently on view, like Yayoi Kusama’s Violet Obsession, a rowboat slipcovered in electric purple “phallic protrusions.”
You can hear audio of Kusama describing how she “encrusted” the boat in soft sculpture protuberances in her favorite pinkish-purple hue “to conquer my fear of sex:”
Boats can come and go limitlessly and move ahead on the water. The boat, having overcome my obsession would move on forever, carrying me onboard
A link to a 1999 interview with Grady T. Turner in BOMB allows Kusama to give further context for the work, part of a sculpture series she conceives of as Compulsion Furniture:
My sofas, couches, dresses, and rowboats bristle with phalluses. … As an obsessional artist I fear everything I see. At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.
That’s a pretty robust art history lesson for the price of opening a new tab, though such deep dives can definitely come at the expense of productivity.
We weren’t expecting the 3‑dimensional nature of some of the works our tabs yielded up.
An excerpt from the 2019 publication,MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York provides a brief bio of both Johnston, “a professional photographer, noted for her portraits of Washington politicians and her images of coal miners, ironworkers, and women laborers in New England textile mills” and the Hampton Institute, Booker T Washington’s alma mater.
Bookmark such bite-sized cultural history breaks, and circle back when you have more time.
Time is something that scares me… or used to. This piece I made with the two clocks was the scariest thing I have ever done. I wanted to face it. I wanted those two clocks right in front of me, ticking.
Project Initiation: Starting a Successful Project
Project Planning: Putting It All Together
Project Execution: Running the Project
Agile Project Management
Capstone: Applying Project Management in the Real World
Above, a Program Manager talks about “her path from dropping out of high school and earning a GED, joining the military, and working as a coder, to learning about program management and switching into that career track.” An introduction to the Project Management certificate appears below.
The Project Management program takes about six months to complete, and should cost about $250 in total. Students get charged $39 per month until they complete the program.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
“Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star,” Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother from Arles in the summer of 1888:
What’s certainly true in this argument is that while alive, we cannot go to a star, any more than once dead we’d be able to take the train.
Judging from thoughts expressed in that same letter, Van Gogh may have conceived of such a death as a “celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, omnibuses and the railway are terrestrial ones”:
To die peacefully in old age would be to go there on foot.
Although his window at the asylum afforded him a sunrise view, and a private audience with the prominent morning star he mentioned in another letter to Theo, Starry Night’s vista is “both an exercise in observation and a clear departure from it,” according to 2019’s MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art:
The vision took place at night, yet the painting, among hundreds of artworks van Gogh made that year, was created in several sessions during the day, under entirely different atmospheric conditions. The picturesque village nestled below the hills was based on other views—it could not be seen from his window—and the cypress at left appears much closer than it was. And although certain features of the sky have been reconstructed as observed, the artist altered celestial shapes and added a sense of glow.
Before or after formulating your own thoughts on The Starry Night and the emotional state that contributed to its execution, get the perspective of singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers in the below episode of ArtZoom, in which popular musicians share their thoughts while navigating around a famous canvas.
Bonus! Throw yourself into a free coloring page of The Starry Nighthere.
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