Brian Williams, an accounting professor at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, records a lesson for GenAI 101 alongside Crimson, an animated AI co-teacher designed to model how students can question, challenge, and learn from generative AI in real time.[/caption]
Indiana University announced last week that its GenAI 101 course — developed by the Kelley School of Business — is now available free of charge to anyone worldwide. The move expands what was already one of the largest generative AI courses in higher education, aimed at helping learners build foundational AI skills increasingly demanded by employers.
“GenAI 101 was designed to prepare students across all fields for an AI-powered world,” says IU President Pamela Whitten in a release. “By making this course broadly available, we’re not only upskilling the talent that drives the state’s economic growth but preparing students to apply these cutting-edge tools responsibly and ethically.”
The expansion builds on a course that was already scaling rapidly inside IU, reaching more than 114,000 students, faculty, staff, and alumni since its launch this summer. The course also features a very recognizable co-teacher: Crimson, the floating AI robot.
MEET CRIMSON, THE AI CO-TEACHER
Brian Williams, accounting professor and chair of Kelley’s new Virtual Advance Business Technologies Department
Brian Williams, an accounting professor at the Kelley School of Business and a Poets&Quants Best Undergraduate Professor of 2024, built GenAI 101 at the direction of President Whitten, who wanted a practical, workforce-focused AI class that could scale quickly.
Notably, the course came out of the business school, not a computer science unit, underscoring IU’s view of generative AI as a core professional skill.
“Employers were coming to IU — including the president’s office and the provost’s office — and saying, ‘Your students need these skills or we will not hire them,’” Williams told Poets&Quants this summer.
William, who chairs Kelley’s Virtual Advanced Business Technologies Department, designed the course like a YouTube series. It includes eight self-paced modules and 16 concise lessons that take students from zero knowledge to building their own AI assistant in roughly three and a half hours. Along the way, they learn how prompts work, why context matters, and how AI models trained on human data can go wrong.
Crimson, a floating Pixar-like animated character with retractable robot arms, acts as Williams co-teacher. The idea came out of a brainstorming session with Kelley’s in-house production team, which set out to build something engaging for learners used to short-form, high-production content while clearly demonstrating skills they can apply immediately.
Crimson is also designed to get things wrong — hallucinating, making mistakes, and delivering confident but incorrect answers – just like real generative AI bots are apt to do.
KELLEY’S AI PUSH
The expansion of GenAI 101 is part of a broader push at the Kelley School of Business to embed artificial intelligence across its curriculum.
Crimson, AI co-teacher
“This initiative is in direct service to President Pamela Whitten’s IU 2030 strategic plan, which emphasizes serving our communities and fostering the kind of innovation that improves lives across Indiana and beyond,” says Patrick E. Hopkins, dean of Kelley.
The school has already rolled out its Kelley AI Playbook, a working guide for integrating generative AI into teaching, grading, research, and service. Next, it plans to update its undergraduate core with four required IT and AI courses, two of which will be open to all IU students in Bloomington and Indianapolis. GenAI 201 will build on the AI fundamentals while diving into business-specific applications, from ROI calculations to AI governance to organizational design. Other schools at IU plan to use the framework to build their own advanced courses.
AI skills are quickly becoming essential, on par with the early days of the internet or mobile computing but evolving faster. Paired with critical thinking, they are emerging as key drivers of productivity.
“As AI capabilities continue to accelerate, it’s a challenge for any organization to stay current with technology that is constantly reinventing itself,” Hopkins says. “The rise of AI makes us all students again.”
Demand is already there. Since launch, businesses, governments, and universities have approached IU about adopting similar training. Opening GenAI 101 to the public, Hopkins says, is a direct response.
You can start taking GenAI 101 course here.
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