Class 1 · Responsible AI
Where everyone starts, whatever they already know. One hour, and it is the only class nobody skips.
Google · Responsible AI · 1 hour. Required by both tracks.
05 / Division
The teaching arm of ALEX. Training in the fields the practice works in every day — offered free of charge, with an individual mentor assigned to you and a subject-matter expert accountable for every class you sit in.
Why this exists
Six years of data, every course MIT and Harvard put on edX.
About 3 percent of participants completed, and the one number nobody quotes: 52 percent of everyone who registered never opened the coursework at all. It takes about ninety seconds to read and it is the whole reason this Institute exists.
See the numbers →Our commitment to open learning
ALEX Institute stands with the open education movement, and has taken up the part of its work that remains undone. We hold that the knowledge required to understand and work responsibly with artificial intelligence should not be rationed by a learner’s ability to pay. Two decades of open education have made that knowledge free. Far too few of the people who reach for it finish. Completion is the segment of the solution ALEX Institute exists to lead.
We have built the Completion Project on that conviction.
Open education is an established movement, not a new idea. ALEX Institute’s commitment to free learning follows a line of declarations and organizations that have made open access to education a working reality over two decades.
The declarations. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration of 2007 set out the principle that educators and learners should be free to use, adapt and share educational resources without cost. The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources, adopted by member states in 2019, made that principle international policy and named access to education a public good.
The organizations. OpenStax, at Rice University, publishes peer-reviewed college textbooks at no cost to students and has become the largest open publisher in the United States. Creative Commons built the licensing framework that lets free educational material be shared legally. SPARC leads the policy work that has brought open textbooks into federal and state legislation. Together they turned free, high-quality learning materials from an aspiration into ordinary practice.
Where ALEX Institute leads. We affirm the principle at the center of that work: access to education is a public good, and the barriers to it should be removed wherever they can be. The open education movement removed the barrier of cost. The barrier that remains is completion, and no organization in the movement has made it their charge. The Completion Project does. It carries the open education principle from materials to outcomes, and ALEX Institute intends to set the standard for how volunteer human support turns free access into finished credentials.
Figure 1 · Two decades of open education, and the part still unclaimed
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The technical instruction already exists and is already free. Google, IBM and NVIDIA publish first-party AI coursework at no cost to learners and issue their own credentials on completion.
Learners who begin free online coursework alone rarely finish it. The most complete study of self-directed online learning, covering every MIT and Harvard course on edX from 2012 to 2018, found that about 3 percent of participants completed. The gap is human, not technical.
Figure 2 · One measurement, one target — drawn so they cannot be mistaken for each other
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Target, not a forecast. The Institute is aiming at a 40–60 percent completion rate by the last cohorts of 2027, against a self-directed baseline of about 3 percent. That result, published and repeatable, is what leadership in this segment will mean. It is stated as a range because no cohort has run yet and nothing here has been measured. We will publish what we actually achieve, against a stated denominator, whatever it turns out to be.
ALEX Institute supplies the human layer. Volunteer mentors, subject-matter experts and speakers provide the structure, accountability and encouragement that turn enrollment into completion.
Every course in our program is delivered directly by its original provider. ALEX does not issue credentials, resell coursework, or place any charge between the learner and the material. Program costs are met by supporters, and ALEX absorbs the remainder.
Figure 3 · Who supplies what, and where no charge sits
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We make this commitment deliberately. Open learning is most valuable to the learners least able to purchase alternatives: students at community colleges, historically Black colleges and universities, liberal arts colleges, and agricultural and technical colleges; adults returning to learning without institutional backing; and senior citizens.
Our program is free to students, and it will remain so.
Reich, J., and J. A. Ruipérez-Valiente. “The MOOC Pivot.” Science 363, no. 6423 (2019): 130–131. Open-access manuscript: hdl.handle.net/1721.1/136215.
The Completion Project
Where everyone starts, whatever they already know. One hour, and it is the only class nobody skips.
Google · Responsible AI · 1 hour. Required by both tracks.
What a model is, what it is doing, and the vocabulary the rest of the program assumes.
Google · AI essentials with Gemini. IBM · AI literacy.
Putting it to work. Prompting, generative tools, and reading the data that goes in and comes out.
Google · GenAI intro and badge. IBM · Data literacy.
Bias, transparency, consent, accountability — and the question every operator faces: what should this system be allowed to decide?
Google · Applying AI principles and the Generative AI leader path. IBM · AI fundamentals, six courses, includes AI ethics.
Seven pathways: AI fluency, data analytics, cybersecurity, IT support, business analyst, software engineering for web, and UX design.
Free · 40+ hours each. Some pathways may be eligible for college credit — confirm in writing with your Registrar or Academic Advisor.
Five courses, from agentic AI explained with no coding required through secure agents, robot learning and OpenUSD.
Free · self-paced · 1–4 hours each.
The class flow
Every class and both tracks on one page — where Track A and Track B branch, and the hours each course runs.
Open the class flow →Open the printable version — three pages, with the evidence behind the design.
Not yet running
None of these is part of the Completion Project, and nothing here enrols you in anything. Leave your name and we will write to you once, when the one you want opens.
How it works
Every course is free, and so is whatever credential its provider awards for finishing. No tuition, no materials fee, no upsell at the end. The Institute is funded as a division of ALEX, not as a product, and it issues no credential of its own.
Each participant is assigned one mentor for the length of the program — a named person who knows your work, answers directly, and stays with you from the first class to the last.
Each class has a named subject-matter expert — someone who does this work for a living and answers your questions inside it. You always know who to go to.