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Also see: Top 45 Artificial Intelligence Companies
It’s no surprise there’s great interest in artificial intelligence courses: artificial intelligence (AI) seems to be making its way into literally every aspect of technology.
In fact, according to Gartner, “By 2020, AI technologies will be virtually pervasive in almost every new software product and service.” And IDC has predicted that worldwide spending on AI will reach $12.5 billion this year, 59.3 percent more than in 2016. By 2020, revenues could skyrocket to more than $46 billion.
This growing focus on AI has many IT pros scrambling to update their knowledge. Courses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing and related topics are attracting huge numbers of students.
To help professionals get the training they need, we’ve put together a list of 35 AI courses designed for everyone from beginners to graduate-level computer science students. Many of these courses fall into the category of massively open online courses (MOOCs) and are available for free (sometimes with a small fee for a related certificate). Others are paid courses or vendor-sponsored classes.
Please note that this is not a ranking. The AI classes are organized into categories and then listed alphabetically within each category.
Not matter what your needs, your budget or your level of experience, you’ll likely find a match in the list below.
MOOC AI Courses
1. ColumbiaX Artificial Intelligence
Provider: Columbia University through EdX
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: 12 weeks, 8-10 hours per week
Certification available: Verified certificate available
Price: Free; $199 for verified certificate
This course provides an introduction to AI, including the history of the discipline, building an intelligent agent, machine learning algorithms and real-world applications. Students should have some familiarity with the Python programming language before taking the course, and they should also understand the basics of probability theory and linear algebra.
2. ColumbiaX MicroMaster Certificate in Artificial Intelligence
Provider: Columbia University through EdX
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: 4 courses, each 12 weeks longs, 8-10 hours per week
Certification available: MicroMaster Credential
Price: Free; $1200 for MicroMaster Credential
Designed for graduate-level computer science students, this four-course program includes the previously mentioned course in artificial intelligence (See #1 above), plus classes in machine learning, robotics, and animation and CGI motion. The course can be taken concurrently or one at a time. Together, the four courses represent the equivalent of about one-quarter of a master’s degree in computer science.
3. Creative Applications of Deep Learning with TensorFlow
Provider: Kadenze Academy
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 5 sessions, 50-60 hours of work
Certification available: Certificate of accomplishment
Price: Free to audit, $20 per month for premium access
This course covers Google’s TensorFlow framework in depth, as well as unsupervised and supervised learning, visualizing and hallucinating representations, and generative models. In order to pass the class, students will need to submit five homework assignments and a final project. This is the first course in a three-course program that delves into deep learning.
4. Fast.ai Practical Deep Learning for Coders
Provider: Fast.ai
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 7 weeks, 10 hours per week
Certification available: None
Price: Free
Fast.ai is an organization dedicated to making machine learning accessible to anyone. Designed for programmers with at least a year of experience, this class focuses on how to use deep learning to solve coding problems.
5. Fast.ai 2: Cutting-Edge Deep Learning for Coders
Provider: Fast.ai
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 7 weeks, 10 hours per week
Certification available: None
Price: Free
The follow-up to Fast.ai’s introductory course, this session covers some of the more recent advances in machine learning. Lessons cover artistic style, generative models, multi-modal and GANs, memory networks, attentional models, neural translation, and time series and segmentation.
Provider: Georgia Tech through EdX
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: 14 weeks, 8-10 hours per week
Certification available: Verified certificate available
Price: Free; $99 for verified certificate
Both theoretical and practical in nature, this course introduces students to the fundamentals of machine learning, including the programming skills necessary for research. It covers topics such as statistical supervised and unsupervised learning methods, randomized search algorithms, Bayesian learning methods, reinforcement learning, inductive bias, the PAC and Mistake‐bound learning frameworks, minimum description length principle and Ockham’s Razor.
Provider: Khan Academy
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 12 units of lessons
Certification available: None
Price: Free
If you have no previous experience with artificial intelligence or machine learning, you might find this introductory course on algorithms helpful. Created by two Dartmouth college professors, it covers searching, sorting, recursion, and graph theory. Learn through a combination of articles, visualizations, quizzes and coding challenges.
Provider: California Institute of Technology
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 1 semester, 18 lectures
Certification available: None
Price: Free
Watched more than 4 million times, this is Caltech’s introductory machine learning class as taught by Yaser Abu-Mostafa in the spring of 2012. In order to understand the course, students should have taken courses in basic probability, matrices and calculus.
9. Machine Learning for Musicians and Artists
Provider: Goldsmiths University of London via Kadenze
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 7 Sessions
Certification available: Course certificate
Price: Free to audit, $20 per month for premium access
While most of the AI and machine learning classes available are designed for aspiring data scientists and developers, this one is for people interested in the arts. It introduces students to the basics of machine learning while focusing specifically on techniques for applying machine learning to human gestures, music and real-time data. It also teaches students to use some of the more common machine learning software and digital arts tools.
10. MIT Course 6.034 Artificial Intelligence
Provider: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Courseware
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 23 one-hour lectures, plus independent work
Certification available: None
Price: Free
MIT has made several versions of this popular class available online. It covers the basics of knowledge representation, problem solving, and learning methods for artificial intelligence, and it leads into a second course on the Human Intelligence Enterprise.
11. MIT 6.803 The Human Intelligence Enterprise
Provider: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Open Courseware
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 26 sessions, self-paced
Certification available: None
Price: Free
Available as either an undergraduate or graduate-level class, The Human Intelligence Enterprise follows up on the topics introduced in MIT’s artificial intelligence course. In some ways, it is more akin to a humanities or psychology course than a computer science course, as it covers computational theories of human thinking and requires substantial reading.
12. MIT 6.S094: Deep Learning for Self-Driving Cars
Provider: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: Self-paced
Certification available: None
Price: Free
Designed to be interesting for both novices and researchers, this course gives students hands-on practice with simulators solving real autonomous driving problems. In addition to the lectures from the instructor, it also includes guest lectures from some of the leading self-driving car researchers.
13. NPTEL Artificial Intelligence
Provider: National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (India)
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: Self-paced
Certification available: None
Price: Free
Sponsored by the Indian government, this series of online lectures covers the fundamentals of AI, including intelligent agents, two-player games, constraint satisfaction, knowledge representation and logic, rule-based learning, fuzzy reasoning, decision trees, neural networks and more. In all, it includes 40 lectures with transcripts available.
14. QUT Big Data: Statistical Inference and Machine Learning
Provider: Queensland University of Technology (Australia) via Future Learn
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: 3 weeks, 2 hours per week
Certification available: Certification of Achievement
Price: Free; certificate costs $69
This course provides students with practical experience using some of the leading open source machine learning tools, including R, R Studio Desktop, H2O Flow and WEKA. It was designed for students who have already taken undergraduate courses in statistics and math. Note that the course is offered on demand as enough students sign up, so you’ll need to register your interest in the class if you would like to take it.
15. Saylor.org CS405: Artificial Intelligence
Provider: Saylor.org Academy
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 8 units, 9-26 hours per unit
Certification available: Certificate of Completion
Price: Free
Saylor.org is a non-profit that offers free, self-paced online courses on a wide variety of topics. This introductory AI course covers search, constraint satisfaction, game playing, logic, machine learning, natural language understanding and robotics. It also includes a final exam, which you must pass in order to get the certificate of completion.
16. UC Berkeley CS188 Intro to AI
Provider: University of California, Berkeley
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 14 weeks
Certification available: None
Price: Free
Recognized as a leader in the field, UC Berkeley offers multiple, highly respected AI courses through its computer science department. The lectures and coursework for this class are available online, although you have to have an EdX Edge account to access the homework. It includes a fun series of Pacman projects that are available for other instructors to use in their classes as well.
17. UC Berkeley CS 294 Deep Reinforcement Learning
Provider: University of California, Berkeley
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 14 weeks
Certification available: None
Price: Free
Taught by Sergey Levine, this course covers topics like imitation learning, policy gradients, model-based reinforcement learning and more. The videos, slides and reading materials are all available online, and there is a link to a subreddit for class discussion.
18. UCL COMPM050/COMPGI13: Reinforcement Learning
Provider: David Silver, University College London
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 10 lectures
Certification available: None
Price: Free
David Silver, who now works for Google DeepMind and is the lead researcher on the AlphaGo project, put together this course on reinforcement learning. The website includes all of his lectures, an assignment, a discussion group and previous exam questions and answers.
Paid Online AI Courses
19. Artificial Intelligence A-Z: Learn How to Build an AI
Provider: Udemy
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 16 hours of lectures
Certification available: Certificate of completion
Price: $200 (at the time of writing a 95 percent discount was available)
Designed for beginners who have taken only high school-level math, this extensive course has 115 different lectures, nearly 17 hours’ worth of instruction in all. It includes coding templates and tutorials, and the course instructors promise to respond to student questions within 48 hours.
20. Artificial Intelligence: Reinforcement Learning in Python
Provider: Udemy
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: 5.5 hours of lectures
Certification available: Certificate of completion
Price: $180 (at the time of writing a 94 percent discount was available)
Created with more advanced students in mind, this course requires understanding of calculus, probability, Markov Models, the Numpy stack, gradient descent and object-oriented programming. It covers reinforcement learning in depth, including gradient-based supervised machine learning, the relationship between reinforcement learning and psychology, and how to implement 17 reinforcement learning algorithms. It includes more than five and a half hours of lectures.
21. Coursera Deep Learning Specialization
Provider: DeepLearning.ai through Coursera
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: 5 courses, 2-4 weeks per course
Certification available: Course certificates
Price: Requires Coursera subscription
Created by Deeplearning.ai, this specialization includes five courses: Neural Networks and Deep Learning; Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter Tuning, Regularization and Optimization; Structuring Machine Learning Projects; Convolutional Neural Networks; and Sequence Models. It covers RNNs, LSTM, Adam, Dropout, BatchNorm and Xavier/He initialization, and it includes practice in TensorFlow and Python.
Provider:Stanford University through Coursera
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: 11 weeks
Certification available: Course certificate
Price: Requires Coursera subscription
Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera, adjunct professor at Stanford University and former head of Baidu AI Group/Google Brain, teaches this highly rated course. His lectures cover linear regression and linear algebra, logistic regression, neural networks, machine learning system design, anomaly detection and much more.
23. Coursera Neural Networks for Machine Learning
Provider:University of Toronto through Coursera
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: 11 weeks
Certification available: Course certificate
Price: Requires Coursera subscription
Taught by professor Geoffrey Hinton, this course covers the basics of neural networks, speech and object recognition, image segmentation, modelling language and more. In order to get the most from the course, you should be comfortable with calculus and programming in Python.
24. Coursera Practical Machine Learning
Provider:Johns Hopkins University through Coursera
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: 4 weeks
Certification available: Course certificate
Price: Requires Coursera subscription
This is the eighth class of the ten-course data specialization certificate available through Coursera. It focuses on using machine learning for predictive analytics and other real-world applications.
25. Udacity Artificial Intelligence Engineer Nanodegree Program
Provider:Udacity, in partnership with IBM, Amazon and DiDi
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: Two, three-month terms
Certification available: Nanodegree credential
Price: $800
Sponsored by IBM Watson, Amazon Alexa and Chinese ride-sharing company DiDi, this Nanodegree program covers search and optimization, building models of probability, computer vision, natural language processing and logic, reasoning and planning. Courses are limited to 1,000 students, and because of the advanced nature of the course material, students must apply for admittance into the course.
26. Udacity Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree Program
Provider:Udacity, in partnership with Kaggle
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: Six months
Certification available: Nanodegree or Nanodegree Plus
Price: $199 per month or $299 per month for Nanodegree Plus, which offers a refund if you don’t find a job.
Very highly rated on Udacity, this program promises to “teach you how to become a machine learning engineer, and apply predictive models to massive data sets in fields like finance, healthcare, education, and more.” It includes multiple projects that can be used to build a portfolio for potential employers, and it includes resume help and technical interview practice. In order to take the course, you should understand Python, statistics, calculus and linear algebra.
University AI Courses
27. CMU Statistical Machine Learning
Provider: Carnegie Mellon University
Delivery method: Traditional Classroom
Duration: 1 semester
Certification available: Master’s degree
Price: Requires CMU tuition, but course materials are available online for free.
Designed for advanced students pursuing a graduate degree in computer science, this course assumes students have already taken courses in machine learning and intermediate statistics. The homework, handouts and video lectures are available online where students can access them for free. Topics covered include linear regression, nonparametric regression, linear classification, minimax theory, clustering, graphical models and more.
28. Georgia Tech CS 6601: Artificial Intelligence
Provider: Georgia Tech
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: 1 semester
Certification available: Master’s degree
Price: Part of OMS CS program, which costs $510 per course and $310 per semester
In cooperation with Udacity, Georgia Tech offers an online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMS CS), and this artificial intelligence program is part of that program. In order to graduate with a master’s degree, students must take 10 courses and declare a specialization in computation perception and robotics, computing systems, interactive intelligence or machine learning.
29. Stanford University CS221: Artificial Intelligence Principles and Techniques
Provider: Stanford University
Delivery method: Traditional classroom
Duration: 1 semester
Certification available: Bachelor’s degree
Price: Requires Stanford University tuition
To take this class officially, you’ll need to apply to Stanford (and be accepted), pay tuition and complete the pre-requisite courses. However, many of the course materials are available online where motivated students can peruse them for free.
30. University of Oxford Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing
Provider: University of Oxford
Delivery method: Traditional classroom
Duration: 1 semester
Certification available: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree
Price: Requires University of Oxford tuition; course materials available for free
This course is part of the computer science program at the University of Oxford, but all the course materials, including lecture notes and videos, are available online at GitHub. Motivated individuals could learn about deep neural networks, word level semantics, language modelling, text classification, conditional language models and more all for free.
Vendor-Sponsored AI Courses
Provider: Intel
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: Two 12-week courses, 3 hours per week
Certification available: No
Price: Free
Intel’s Nervana AI Academy website provides a wealth of resources, like downloadable frameworks, AI development tools, videos and tutorials, in addition to two structured courses: Machine Learning 101 and Deep Learning 101. It also includes links to university resources to enhance your learning.
32. Learn TensorFlow and Deep Learning, Without a Ph.D.
Provider: Google Cloud Platform
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration:8 sessions; 3 hours of lectures
Certification available: No
Price: Free
If you only have a little bit of time to devote to learning about AI, this might be a good option for you. Martin Görner, Google Cloud Platform developer advocate, teaches this crash course in deep-learning fundamentals. Originally presented at a conference in Belgium, it covers dense, convolutional and recurrent networks, and training techniques such as dropout or batch normalization. There is also an accompanying self-paced codelab.
33. Microsoft Professional Program in Data Science
Provider: EdX and Microsoft
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: 9 courses plus a final project; 16-32 hours per course
Certification available: Verified Certificate
Price: $99 per course or $990 for the entire program
This course starts with the basics like using Excel to explore data and using SQL to query databases. But it ramps up quickly, delving into statistical models, R, Python, and machine learning using Microsoft Azure services. Note that because it is a Microsoft-sponsored course, it focuses primarily on learning Microsoft’s data science and machine learning tools.
34. OpenSAP Enterprise Deep Learning with TensorFlow
Provider: SAP
Delivery method: Online, instructor-led
Duration: 6 weeks
Certification available: No
Price: Free
Designed for application developers and data scientists, this advanced course offers hands-on practice applying deep learning techniques to real-world enterprise use cases. It focuses primarily on using Google’s TensorFlow framework. In order to take the class, you will need basic knowledge of Python, linear algebra and calculus.
35. Titanic: Machine Learning from Disaster
Provider: Kaggle
Delivery method: Online, self-paced
Duration: NA
Certification available: No
Price: Free
This Kaggle challenge isn’t a course per say; instead, it’s a competition designed to teach novices some of the fundamentals of machine learning. This beginner project asks competitors to analyze the available data to determine the odds that any given individual survived the sinking of the Titanic. If you’ve already completed a MOOC, this is a good opportunity to practice your newfound skills. You’ll need a basic understanding of Python and R.
