Open your inbox on any given morning and something is trying to sell you AI. A copilot for this, an assistant for that, a platform that will transform your housing service if you would only sign the order form. Almost none of it is aimed at the people who actually do the work, and almost none of it starts where they are. So rather than sell anyone AI, we built the course we wished existed and put it in the members area, free. It is called the Academy.
Foundations before features
People rarely struggle with AI because the tools are too hard. They struggle because nobody gave them the groundwork first: how their own Microsoft 365 really works, how to structure a spreadsheet so it can be trusted, what a large language model is actually doing when it answers, and where the sharp edges sit around data protection. Sell someone a copilot before that, and you get expensive disappointment. Teach the foundations first, and most of the tools explain themselves.
That is the whole idea. The Academy is an eight-week AI foundations course, written for people in and around housing, that you work through at your own pace. There is no cohort to keep up with and no clock ticking. The week advances when you do.
What the eight weeks cover
The route is deliberate, and it builds:
- Weeks 1 and 2 start on solid ground: Microsoft 365 done properly (Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint) and Excel for real work, tables and formulas rather than party tricks.
- Weeks 3 and 4 are the core: AI fundamentals and prompt craft. What these models are, what they are not, and how to write a prompt that gets you a useful answer instead of a merely plausible one.
- Weeks 5 and 6 move from asking to building: Power Automate and the wider Power Platform, so you can take a repetitive job and hand it to a flow.
- Weeks 7 and 8 are the parts most courses skip: data protection and GDPR, then responsible AI and the people skills to bring colleagues with you. When the data is about someone’s home and tenancy, that is not optional reading.
Twenty-six resources in all, with a practice task in most weeks, so you finish having built something rather than just watched videos.
Built from the open web, not another paywall
Every resource in the course is free. Instead of recording our own lectures, we curated the best free training already out there and arranged it into an order that makes sense: Microsoft Learn, the OpenAI Academy, Google’s Prompting Essentials, the University of Helsinki’s Elements of AI, guidance straight from the ICO and the NCSC. Several of the modules hand you a certificate or a badge you keep. We did the tedious part, which is deciding what is worth your time and what to ignore, and put it in a straight line.
The hard part of learning AI now is not finding material. It is knowing what to ignore.
It remembers where you got to
The Academy is not a reading list you lose in a bookmark folder. Your progress is saved against your own account, week by week. You can keep private notes as you go, sit six short quizzes that are graded on the server so the answers are not sitting in the page, keep a running test log of how you did, and upload the certificates you earn so your record lives in one place. Sign in a month later and it is exactly where you left it.
Who it is for
Not data scientists. It is for the housing officer, the analyst, the back-office person who keeps hearing about AI and would quietly like to understand it properly before deciding what to trust. No coding background is assumed, and it starts with visual, no-code tools before it asks anything harder of you. If you can find your way around Excel, you can start on week one.
The same foundations we are teaching our own apprentice
A fortnight ago I wrote about taking on our first apprentice on the new Level 4 AI and Automation Practitioner standard. This is the same ground they start on. We are not teaching one version to a member of staff and selling a different one to everyone else. The foundations are the foundations, and it felt wrong to keep them behind a desk when we could hand them to the people we work with too.
It lives in the members area at /members/learning/academy. The members area is free: sign in with a Google or Microsoft account and week one is waiting. Work through it in eight weeks or eight months, whatever real life allows. The deadline was never the point. The foundations were.
