You can earn your Google Al Professional Certificate

What happened

After working through the first few modules, I had mixed feelings about recommending the course to earn a Google AI Professional Certificate, mostly because it starts with some inconveniences and annoyances. But after completing the course and considering what you get going through the whole thing, I highly recommend it. In this article, I'll take you through what Google and Coursera are offering and what you'll get from the process.

Stay tuned to the end because I'll offer some essential tips for completing the course and getting your certificate for free. I'll also outline some of the annoyances, because they do need to be mentioned. The Google AI Professional Certificate is a bundle of individual hour-long courses.

Eight of them, to be precise: Each course consists of a few video clips by Google staffers, one or two AI-narrated overviews, and some lab time. From an educational theory perspective, each course is very well-designed. The sequence of courses, as they relate to each other, is also strong, with each building on the previous one.

Vygotsky's theory of cognitive development discusses scaffolding in which one bit of learning is stacked on top of another. The idea behind cognitivism is that you build knowledge one bit at a time, stretching yourself slightly as you increase understanding. Each course in this Google certificate program does that.

The earlier courses form the scaffolding for the later ones, so by the time you reach data analysis and even app development, nothing comes as a surprise. At that point, you have all the foundational knowledge to absorb the more complex concepts. Key to this is the actualization of another educational theory, constructivism. The idea here is that we learn by doing and that everyone's learned experiences are unique.

The more you can engage students by guided discovery and helping them build their own knowledge, the better it will stick. Each course is divided into modules. Each module has one or more lab projects. Lab projects are essentially guided use of Gemini to build or accomplish something. The courseware experience is split into two windows, with Gemini on the left and the course guidance and video on the right.

You can follow the prompts provided. Each prompt leaves room for you to add your own interests and subjects, making each use of Gemini in the context of the course unique. Unlike Google's free AI Essentials course from last year, this class is not AI-agnostic. This is a very, very Gemini-centric class. That said, almost all the learning you can take from this course can apply to other AIs.

Up until the app development courses, each course in the Google AI Professional Certificate ends with a quiz that you must pass to continue. I really enjoyed most of the quizzes. I was moderately disappointed that the 'quizzes' for the app development courses at the end of the certificate were open-ended, ungraded questions rather than the more immediate multiple-choice questions of the earlier courses.

Here's what impressed me, and why I'm recommending this course so highly. The overall learning process is so well constructed that by the time you reach the data analysis section, you'll have some understanding of how to use AI for complex data analysis. Like the other courses in this certification, the data analysis course only takes about an hour.

But the course walks you through using Gemini, Google Sheets, and Canvas to do some fairly powerful unstructured data analysis with enough takeaways that you should be able to use some of it right away. The app development courses are similar. This is not a full-tilt software development course by any means. Google's instructors take you into Google AI Studio to build apps that you wouldn't deploy commercially.

But they are apps you could definitely share with your own team and deploy internally. That alone is huge. The class introduces the idea of vibe coding and shows how to construct apps. With the lab experience, you're walked through creating three separate apps you can actually use. A second class considers testing, debugging, and deploying.

Why it matters

And to be fair, this is a Google AI Professional Certification, not just a generic AI course. Behaviorism learning theory states that learning is based on stimulus, responses, and consequences. Quizzes are a classic example of behaviorism in practice, where the question is the environmental situation that requires a response, the student's answers are the responses, and the consequences (and feedback to the student) provide the immediate reinforcement of learning.

What to watch

Again, the hands-on experience means that by the time you're done, you will have actually built some small apps. This progress is what impressed me. The course starts from the absolute basics of generative AI. Yet within about eight hours, assuming you do the work, you'll have a fairly decent hands-on, basic understanding of app development. For free. Or, at least, free-ish.

The Google AI Professional Certificate is technically not free. But you don't necessarily have to pay for it. The blue text box says "Enroll for free," but that's enrolling, not learning. In reality, you're signing up for a free seven-day trial on Coursera. How the seven-day trial works. This is where things get a little confusing. " There's a lot of upsell here. For example, when I completed the AI Fundamentals course, I received this message.