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Coursera

Claude Certified Associate - Foundations

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Overview

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Build confidence using Claude in everyday professional work and prepare for the Claude Certified Associate – Foundations (CCAO-F) exam. You'll progress from a plain-language understanding of how Claude works to reliable AI-assisted workflows, practicing on realistic workplace scenarios such as support replies, vendor comparisons, and policy questions. No programming background is required. Throughout the course, you'll explore: How Claude Works: Understand tokens, context windows, and why plausible answers can still be wrong, match chat, Projects, research mode, and artifacts to everyday tasks, and choose between Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus based on quality, speed, and cost. Prompting and Task Execution: Write clear task briefs, refine results with examples and targeted revisions, adapt your approach for analysis, research, drafting, and brainstorming, and break complex requests into steps with checkpoints. Configuration and Knowledge Management: Keep long conversations focused, decide what belongs in memory, build Projects with reusable instructions and reference files, keep sources current, and bring in Google Drive documents and Gmail messages through approved connectors. Output Evaluation and Responsible Use: Check answers for completeness, invented details, contradictions, and unfair assumptions, verify claims and calculations, match human oversight to the stakes, reduce sensitive data exposure, and work within your organization's AI rules. Workflows and Troubleshooting: Translate business goals into practical requirements, build and test no-code prototypes, place Claude into team processes and handoffs, make an evidence-based business case, and diagnose whether a weak result comes from instructions, missing context, setup, or permissions. By the end, you'll be able to choose the right Claude approach for a task, judge whether a result is ready to use, and reason through original workplace scenarios across all seven exam domains.

Syllabus

  • Understanding Claude and Its Capabilities
    • What is actually happening when Claude answers my question, and how do I know which Claude feature or model to use? This module answers that question in plain language and gives you a working mental model you can apply on the job. You will be able to explain how a large language model turns tokens and context into a response, why a fluent answer can still be wrong, and how to choose between chat, Projects, research mode, and artifacts, and between Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus, for a given workplace task. You will work with everyday analogies, illustrative token splits, side-by-side comparisons of supported and invented answers, and short task comparisons that weigh quality, speed, and cost. The module also orients you to the CCAO-F exam format, its scaled passing score, and the seven official domains with their weights, so you know what kind of judgment the certification rewards. It is designed for professionals in operations, analysis, project management, marketing, education, HR, and consulting who use or plan to use Claude; no programming or prior Claude experience is required. You will leave with a decision guide that matches common work tasks to the right Claude feature and model, plus a clear rule for when an answer needs verification or human oversight before you use it.
  • Directing Claude with Effective Instructions
    • How do I tell Claude exactly what I need so the first draft is close to usable? This module shows you how to turn vague requests into clear, testable instructions for the most common kinds of knowledge work. You will be able to write a complete task brief that states the task, context, audience, constraints, output format, and success criteria, then revise it with targeted changes when a result falls short. You will practice separating instructions from source material, adding a small representative example to clarify a classification or tone, contrasting prompts for analysis, research, drafting, and brainstorming, and decomposing an oversized request into steps with review points between them. Worked scenarios include a customer-support reply, a vendor comparison, a campaign brief, and a multi-part recommendation, all built on synthetic data. The module is designed for business professionals who use Claude for writing, analysis, or research; no coding or prompt-engineering background is required, only access to a Claude account if you want to repeat the demonstrations. You will leave with a reusable task-brief template, a prompt-revision checklist tied to success criteria, and a tested prompt sequence for a complex request that you can adapt to your own work.
  • Giving Claude the Right Information
    • Why does Claude lose track of earlier instructions or answer without our company's policy, and how do I fix that for good? This module shows you how to manage what Claude has available for each task so your results stay accurate and consistent over time. You will be able to decide when to restart, summarize, or persist information, then configure a Claude Project with a bounded purpose, approved reference material, and clear, testable instructions that you keep current as requirements change. You will practice writing a checked handoff summary for a long conversation, comparing product memory with maintained Project knowledge, building a small ShopAssist support Project from synthetic policy files, replacing vague instructions with specific source-use and exception rules, updating an outdated return policy, and retrieving authorized Google Drive documents and Gmail messages through connectors. The module is designed for professionals who rely on Claude for recurring work such as policy questions, support replies, or team documentation; no technical setup skills are required, and connector access depends on your account and organizational settings. You will leave with a working Project configuration, a maintenance checklist covering source ownership, review triggers, and retests, and a clear rule for when a missing answer calls for an access check rather than a longer prompt.
  • Assessing and Refining AI Results
    • How can I tell whether a polished AI answer is actually correct, complete, and ready to share? This module gives you a repeatable review process for any Claude output before it reaches a colleague, customer, or decision-maker. You will be able to evaluate a response against the task's requirements, identify hallucinations, contradictions, and unfair assumptions, verify claims against authoritative sources, and decide when human review is required, then refine and format the result for its audience. You will practice with task-specific checklists, claim-to-source tracing, fixed checks for totals and required fields in a spreadsheet, escalation notes that state the claim, evidence, uncertainty, and consequence, bias annotation, audience-focused revision, and choosing between inline text, artifacts, and structured tables. All examples use synthetic support summaries, policy documents, extraction tables, and communications drafts. The module is designed for professionals who use Claude-generated content in their work and for CCAO-F candidates preparing for the most heavily weighted exam domain; no statistics or programming background is required. You will leave with a verification checklist matched to the consequence of an error, a reviewed and corrected deliverable in an appropriate format, and an escalation template for decisions that need human judgment.
  • Using AI with Care and Accountability
    • Is it acceptable to use Claude for this task, with this information, under my organization's rules? This module helps you answer that question with confidence before you upload a file, share a draft, or rely on an AI-assisted decision. You will be able to assess the ethical implications of an AI-assisted activity, minimize and redact sensitive information appropriately, and determine whether to proceed, change the approach, or escalate to privacy, security, or compliance owners. You will apply practical criteria covering effects on people, transparency, attribution, fairness, and human accountability; organizational data classifications from public to potentially regulated; redaction and anonymization techniques, including checks for re-identification; and governance controls such as approved tools, authorized accounts, sharing and retention settings, and required approvals. Scenarios include a communications draft that raises disclosure questions, a synthetic customer table that still identifies a person after names are removed, and a proposed data-sharing request. The module is designed for any professional who handles workplace information with Claude, including team leads who approve AI-assisted work; no legal or compliance background is required, and no jurisdiction-specific legal advice is given. You will leave with a responsible-use decision checklist, a data-minimization routine to apply before any upload, and a clear escalation path for situations your organization's policies do not resolve.
  • Developing Practical AI Solutions at Work
    • How do I turn a business problem into a Claude-assisted solution that my team will trust and adopt? This module walks you from an unclear request to a tested prototype and a credible recommendation for stakeholders. You will be able to analyze requirements, plan work from research findings, identify process bottlenecks, build and test a small no-code business prototype, place Claude into a team workflow with clear handoffs, and present its value and limitations with evidence. You will use Claude to examine business briefs for goals, users, and gaps; write acceptance criteria; compare use cases by value, feasibility, risk, and review effort; convert findings into tasks, owners, and dependencies; and test a prototype with normal, incomplete, ambiguous, and exception cases. A synthetic ShopAssist draft-and-review workflow and a five-step onboarding process anchor the examples. The module is designed for business analysts, operations staff, project managers, and consultants who shape how teams use AI; no coding is required, and you will learn when custom integration or deployment should be handed to a developer or architect. You will leave with a requirements summary, a tested prototype such as an intake questionnaire or decision aid, a workflow map with human approval points, and a short stakeholder recommendation that requests a bounded next decision.
  • Improving Performance and Practicing Exam Decisions
    • Why is my Claude workflow still underperforming, and how do I reason through CCAO-F scenario questions with confidence? This module helps you diagnose problems systematically and apply associate-level judgment across all seven exam domains. You will be able to measure an AI-assisted workflow against a baseline, trace a poor result to its actual cause, apply the smallest effective fix, confirm the improvement with a small test, and select the best action in cross-domain exam cases. You will use before-and-after tables that include human review time, a symptom-to-check table that separates unclear instructions from missing or outdated context, conflicting Project instructions, permission failures, and unsuitable feature or model choices, and a feedback-to-hypothesis routine that checks normal and exception cases for regressions. Two original worked cases, an unsupported policy answer and a workflow whose review burden removes the expected savings, model how to rule out tempting wrong answers. The module is designed for professionals who maintain Claude-assisted processes and for learners preparing for the Claude Certified Associate – Foundations exam; no technical troubleshooting background is required. You will leave with a reusable troubleshooting checklist, a documented improvement decision based on total results, and a step-by-step method for answering multiple-choice and multiple-response scenario questions.

Taught by

Anton Pavelko and Anton Voroniuk

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