Claude 101
A practical 5-module course that turns Claude from “that AI thing” into a reliable thinking partner for your actual work.
Taught by Edwin Ashdown. Founder of AIFirstPartner, 12 production AI systems shipped.
You are a professional or knowledge worker — marketer, analyst, consultant, salesperson, manager, operator — who is ready to stop dabbling with AI and start using Claude seriously in your day-to-day work. You do not need any coding background.
Who this is not for: developers who already live in Claude Code, or anyone looking for a 30-hour enterprise AI strategy course.
Why your first Claude prompts were fine and not great, and the three-part brief that fixes it in one weekend.
5 lessons
Stop re-pasting the same context. Turn Claude into a workspace that remembers your work.
5 lessons
Plug Claude into Gmail, Drive, Slack, and your company docs, so it stops asking you for context it should already have.
5 lessons
Which Claude surface does your job actually live in, and the two or three use cases worth doing this week.
4 lessons
Leave with a one-page Claude workflow plan you will still be using in a month.
3 lessons
Edwin Ashdown founded AIFirstPartner and has shipped 12 production AI systems for clients in government, legal, and enterprise. He is fractional CTO at Speculo, a cyber risk software company, and manages cloud and data platform engineering for a large Australian government department supporting 20+ agencies. He publishes his build process at 150days.aifirstpartner.com.
This course is the playbook he uses when onboarding a team onto Claude.
Anthropic Academy is excellent and free. Claude 101 is the 3–4 hour opinionated path through the same material, with exercises against your real work and a one-page workflow plan at the end. If you have the time to piece Academy together yourself, do that. If you want the fast, curated path with a Monday-morning habit at the end, this.
No. Claude 101 is designed for professionals and knowledge workers. The course explains technical concepts (like MCP or Claude Code) in plain language and focuses on practical use in your role.
A free Claude.ai account is enough for most lessons. Some features covered — Projects knowledge bases, Enterprise Search, and Claude for Work — require a paid or Team/Enterprise plan. The course tells you which is which, so you can decide what to try now versus later.
Around 3–4 hours end-to-end if you do the exercises, spread over as many sessions as you like. Each lesson is short (5–15 minutes), and exercises use your real work so the time is productive.
Module 1 covers what Claude is, how to write your first effective prompts, how to troubleshoot common prompt problems using the four-competency prompt framework, and how to choose between Chat, Cowork, and Code in the desktop app. It is the whole foundation to get you started.
No. Claude 101 is independent. This course is not an Anthropic product and has not been reviewed or endorsed by them.