Think clearly about AI — no coding required
Navigate the real ethical challenges of artificial intelligence — from algorithmic bias and deepfakes to copyright and surveillance — with clarity, critical thinking, and no coding required.
"You don't need to understand how AI is built to have a say in how it's used — you need to think clearly, and that's exactly what I'm here to help you do."— Carla Paton
What you'll learn
What you'll be able to do
- Apply major ethical frameworks — utilitarian, rights-based, and virtue ethics — to evaluate real AI systems and decisions
- Identify and explain concrete forms of algorithmic bias and discrimination in hiring, lending, policing, and healthcare
- Assess privacy risks in AI-driven data collection, facial recognition, and surveillance technologies
- Critically evaluate generative AI's impact on copyright, authorship, and intellectual property
- Analyze how automation and AI are reshaping employment, education, journalism, and the creative industries
- Develop a personal, reasoned framework for responsible AI use in your professional and everyday life
How it works
A school that adapts to you
This isn't a set of static videos. Every lesson is generated live and tuned to where you actually are.
We learn your level
A quick placement check tailors your starting point so you're never bored or lost.
Lessons adapt as you go
Each lesson is written for your pace and your goal, adjusting as your skills grow.
Your AI coach keeps you moving
Checkpoints, feedback, and gentle nudges turn progress into a real result.
The curriculum
What's inside your school
6 modules · 22 lessons
What AI Actually Is — and Isn't
Before students can reason ethically about AI, they need an accurate mental model of what AI systems are, how they work, and where they succeed or fail. This foundational module eliminates common myths and misconceptions, establishes shared vocabulary for the rest of the course, and introduces the stakes — social, political, and personal — of getting AI ethics right. No technical background is assumed.
- 1.1Demystifying Artificial IntelligenceIncluded
- 1.2How AI Systems Make DecisionsIncluded
- 1.3The AI Landscape Today — Capabilities, Limits, and StakesIncluded
Ethical Frameworks — Tools for Thinking Clearly
Ethics without frameworks is opinion; frameworks without cases are empty. This module equips students with the major philosophical lenses — consequentialism, rights-based ethics, virtue ethics, and fairness-centered approaches — applied directly to AI scenarios. Students practice using each framework as an analytical tool, then grapple with real situations where the frameworks collide, building the reasoning muscle that powers every subsequent module. Crucially, an introductory lesson on why ethics is hard establishes intellectual humility before the frameworks are introduced.
- 2.1Why Ethics Is Hard — Moral Reasoning as a SkillIncluded
- 2.2Consequentialism and the Greater GoodIncluded
- 2.3Rights, Duties, and Human DignityIncluded
- 2.4Virtue Ethics — What Kind of AI World Do We Want to Live In?Included
- 2.5When Frameworks Conflict — Making Hard CallsIncluded
Bias, Fairness, and Discrimination
Algorithmic bias is one of the most documented and consequential harms in deployed AI. This module moves from abstract fairness concepts to concrete, sector-specific case studies in hiring, lending, criminal justice, healthcare, and education. Students learn where bias originates in the AI pipeline, how it is measured, and what technical and social interventions can reduce it — understanding that bias is never a purely technical problem and always a political and ethical one too.
- 3.1What Is Algorithmic Bias — and Where Does It Come From?Included
- 3.2Bias in Hiring, Lending, and Criminal JusticeIncluded
- 3.3Bias in Healthcare and EducationIncluded
Privacy, Surveillance, and the Data Economy
AI's hunger for data has produced a surveillance infrastructure that most people neither fully understand nor consented to. This module examines how personal data is collected, commodified, and used to power AI systems; how facial recognition and biometric technologies challenge civil liberties; and how AI-enabled surveillance is reshaping workplaces, schools, and public spaces. Students develop a principled vocabulary for evaluating privacy harms and a practical understanding of the legal landscape.
- 4.1The Data Economy — What Is Collected, How, and WhyIncluded
- 4.2Facial Recognition — Accuracy, Bias, and Civil LibertiesIncluded
- 4.3AI Surveillance — Workplaces, Schools, and Public SpacesIncluded
Generative AI — Creativity, Truth, and Ownership
Generative AI has arrived with extraordinary speed, compressing disruptions to creative industries, intellectual property law, information integrity, and education into just a few years. This module examines generative AI's most pressing ethical dimensions: who owns AI-generated content, how synthetic media threatens truth and trust, and how generative tools are reshaping roles in education, journalism, and the arts. Crucially, this module adds a lesson on disinformation and synthetic media that was sequenced too late in the original draft given its centrality to public discourse.
- 5.1How Generative AI Works — A Non-Technical PrimerIncluded
- 5.2Copyright, Authorship, and Intellectual PropertyIncluded
- 5.3Deepfakes, Disinformation, and the Integrity of TruthIncluded
- 5.4Generative AI in Education, Journalism, and the ArtsIncluded
AI, Society, and Responsible Action
The course culminates by zooming out to the systemic level — examining how AI governance works (or fails), who has power in AI development, and how automation is reshaping the economy and labor — before zooming back in to help each student develop a personal, actionable framework for responsible AI use. Two important additions to the original draft: a dedicated lesson on AI and the future of work (which appeared only as a single lesson and is central to the stated outcomes) and a restructuring that places transparency and accountability before governance, since the former logically motivates the latter.
- 6.1Automation, Employment, and Economic JusticeIncluded
- 6.2Transparency, Explainability, and AccountabilityIncluded
- 6.3AI Governance — Who Decides, and HowIncluded
- 6.4Developing Your Personal Framework for Responsible AI UseIncluded
Who it's for
Is this you?
Educators & Teachers
Navigating AI in the classroom — from surveillance tools to student chatbot use — requires ethical clarity that this course delivers directly.
Business Professionals
When your organization adopts AI-driven hiring, customer profiling, or automation, you need a principled framework to evaluate the trade-offs — not just the ROI.
Policymakers & Civic Leaders
From municipal surveillance contracts to AI procurement decisions, this course equips you to ask the governance questions that actually protect your constituents.
Journalists & Creatives
Generative AI is rewriting the rules on authorship, copyright, and truth — this course gives you the conceptual vocabulary to cover it rigorously or protect your own work.
Healthcare Workers
AI is entering diagnostics, triage, and patient data — understanding algorithmic bias and privacy stakes in healthcare is now a professional responsibility.
Engaged Citizens
If you believe democratic participation requires understanding the systems shaping your life, this course turns AI anxiety into informed, articulate civic engagement.
Questions
Frequently asked
Your teacher
A note from your teacher
Carla Paton
If you've been following the AI conversation with a growing sense that something important is happening — something that affects hiring, privacy, creativity, truth, and power — but you're not sure you have the right tools to think about it clearly, I want to start by saying: that instinct is exactly right, and this course was built for you.
You don't need to understand how a neural network is trained to have a stake in how AI is used. You need something more fundamental — a way of asking the right questions. What values are embedded in this system? Who benefits, and who bears the risk? What rights are in tension here, and how should we weigh them? These are ethical and political questions, not technical ones, and they're the questions this course is organized around.
We spend real time on the frameworks — consequentialism, rights-based ethics, virtue ethics — not because I want you to memorize philosophical vocabulary, but because these tools genuinely help you make harder calls more clearly. Then we put them to work on the issues that deserve serious scrutiny: the bias baked into hiring and lending algorithms, the civil-liberties stakes of facial recognition, the copyright earthquake that generative AI is triggering, the disinformation threat posed by deepfakes, and the deeper governance question of who gets to set the rules for all of it. Every lesson is anchored in a real case, because that's where ethics actually lives.
The biggest objection I hear from prospective students is some version of: "I'm not technical enough for this." I want to address that directly. This course deliberately and consistently distinguishes between how AI works — which you don't need to master — and what AI does in the world, which is entirely your business as a citizen, a professional, and a person. The first module demystifies AI systems in plain language, and we never require technical knowledge as a prerequisite for the ethical analysis that follows.
What I can promise you is this: by the time you finish, you'll have a personal, reasoned framework for evaluating AI — one you built yourself, from evidence and argument, not received opinion. You'll be able to walk into the conversations that matter in your field and ask better questions than almost anyone else in the room. That's not a small thing. In a world being reshaped by these systems, clear ethical thinking is one of the most valuable skills you can develop.
I hope you'll join me.
— Carla Paton
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- 6 modules, 22 lessons
- AI-adaptive lessons tuned to your level
- Quizzes & checkpoints to lock in progress
- Your own AI learning coach
- Learn on any device, at your pace
- Full access for as long as you're subscribed