New Free Course: Boosting Productivity with AI

September 21, 2025
Luis Hernández

Category: AI in Education, Online Course, Parental Involvement, Professional Development

AI-Generated Audios

At Enabling Learning, we create and share a free online course every new school year as part of our mission to provide resources that make a real difference.

Last year, we focused on supporting Hispanic parents and immigrant families with a course designed to help them better understand the U.S. education system. Our goal was simple: to help families thrive by giving them the knowledge and confidence to support their children in school.

This year, we turn our attention to a new challenge and opportunity: artificial intelligence (AI).

Why a Course on AI?

AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude are rapidly changing how we live and work. While most people interact with them through a simple chat window, these tools can do so much more. With the proper knowledge, AI can become a reliable partner that saves time, reduces repetition, and increases clarity, whether you’re in the classroom, the office, or at home.

In recent blog posts, we’ve highlighted some of the resources available for parents and educators to begin exploring AI. With this new course, we wanted to go deeper: to show how to unlock the advanced features that usually sit behind premium plans, and to demonstrate how these tools can directly boost productivity for teachers, administrators, and parents alike.

Course Overview

Our free course Boosting Productivity with AI will guide you beyond casual chatting and into the world of custom AI assistants. These assistants can follow your instructions, use your documents, and adapt to your unique goals.

You’ll learn how to:

Understand AI and large language models in simple terms.
Recognize the difference between basic chat and a customized assistant.
Build and use Custom GPTs, Gemini Gems, and Claude Projects.
Explore NotebookLM, a powerful tool for turning dense materials into clear text, audio, and video.

What You’ll Gain

By the end of this course, you’ll know how to design AI assistants that:

Save you valuable time on routine tasks.
Ensure consistency across your work.
Transform complex information into clear and usable outputs.
Free you to focus on the things that matter most, whether that’s teaching, leading, creating, or spending time with your family.

Who This Course Is For

Teachers who want to streamline lesson planning, translation, or differentiation.
Administrators who need faster ways to draft announcements, summarize meetings, or prepare reports.
Content creators who want structured support for brainstorming, outlining, and editing.
Parents who want tools to better organize schedules, events, or bilingual communication with schools.

Artificial intelligence is here to stay, and learning how to use it responsibly is no longer optional. This course is our way of helping you embrace AI with confidence, making it a partner that enhances—not overwhelms—your work and life.

We invite you to explore Boosting Productivity with AI and discover practical ways to turn cutting-edge tools into everyday support.

How We Use AI, and Why Our Digital Credentials Require Evidence

When we talk about our work with educators, at conferences and with universities, two questions come up: how do we use AI, and what does our digital credential actually prove? We answered both in writing, in two new pages on our website. The first is a note from our founder, Luis J. Hernández, on how an educator came to build with AI and where we draw the line. The second explains why our digital credentials are issued only when a learner shows the skill, and why that matters for learners and the institutions that prepare them.

A single objectives card pinned on an elementary classroom wall, with a stack of cards for the rest of the week on the teacher's desk.

One Objective on the Wall. Five Levels in the Room.

Principals want the ELPS posted, but one classroom holds students at five proficiency levels. How do you post one objective for all of them? We answered with something teachers can print and use, the Objectives Card in the ELPS Online Helper: one content objective, one language objective, and a strip showing what meeting it looks like at each level. Here is what it does, what we added after seeing how teachers used it, including a week planner and cards for lessons taught in Spanish, and why it matters in a dual-language classroom.

Layered translucent glass panes suspended in dark blue space, each etched with glowing abstract letterforms from a different writing system, overlapping and interlocking where the panes cross.

Verónica Speaks Twelve Languages. The Hard Part Was the Rules.

Verónica, the AI tutor inside our courses and apps, now responds in twelve languages. Arabic, Telugu, Tamil, and Korean joined because districts and teacher preparation faculty kept describing the families they serve. Adding the languages was never the hard part, since these models were multilingual from the start. The hard part was the rules: which characters even count as letters, whether the page or the person gets to decide, and when a tutor should hold the target language instead of following a student into English. Here is what broke, what we changed, and why it matters.

A Certificate No One Can Verify. It Is Just a File.

Most professional certificates share one weakness: confirming they are real means contacting the issuer and waiting, so in practice it rarely happens. A PDF can be edited in a browser. A paper certificate proves only that someone owned a printer. This post makes the case for digital credentials for both learners and institutions, looks at what the 2026 hiring research actually shows, explains why course completion is the wrong trigger for issuing one, and describes transparently how our scored capstone gates work, why we chose the Proof of Knowledge platform, and what we would tell any institution starting from zero.