Where do the courses come from?
We check 53 sources. 27 are "must include" sources such as the big AI companies, the main learning platforms, Irish funding schemes and Irish universities. 26 more are included while they are practical to check automatically. We use official APIs and sitemaps where they exist, read public course pages otherwise, and check 7 sites that block automated requests by hand in a browser, at human pace.
Some well-known platforms are not listed because their terms or robots.txt rules don't allow automated checking. We don't work around those rules.
What gets in?
- The course is about AI, or about using AI tools, and anyone can enrol (or anyone eligible for a public scheme).
- Its provider's own page states the course details.
- We know its level and whether it costs money. If the provider doesn't state a level, we assign one and label it "our assessment".
- We have written our own take on it.
What does "verified" mean?
The date on each course is the last day we confirmed its details on the provider's own page. If we can't confirm a course for 90 days, it drops out of our lists until we can. Where the provider doesn't state something, we say "not stated by provider". We never estimate prices, dates or durations; where we work a duration out from the provider's schedule, we label it "estimated".
How is the list updated?
- Each week, an automated check visits our sources on their own schedule (weekly for most, monthly for slower ones, before the dates of dated courses).
- New and changed course pages are read, and every extracted fact must quote text that appears on the provider's page. Anything that can't be matched is not changed.
- Changes go into a weekly review. Price, certificate, level and new courses are checked by the editor before they go live.
- The site rebuilds every morning, so dates and "starts in" counts stay current.
What do the tags mean?
| Tag | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Free | The course is free to take, as stated by the provider. |
| Free for a limited time | The provider says the course is free only for now, for example during a beta. |
| Free to learn | You can take the course for free, but the certificate, exam or full access costs extra. |
| Funded | A public scheme pays some or all of the fee for eligible people. |
| Free certificate | The certificate, badge or exam is included at no cost. |
| NFQ L{n} | A formal Irish qualification at that level of the National Framework of Qualifications. |
| IE | An Irish provider, an Irish location or an Irish funding scheme. |
| Licence needed | You need a paid tool licence or subscription to take part, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot or ChatGPT Plus. |
| Price in USD | The provider shows the price in US dollars. We never convert currencies. |
| Closed | Applications are closed. We show the next intake if the provider has announced it. |
How do you make money?
We don't, yet. There are no affiliate links or paid listings. If we add affiliate links later, they won't affect which courses we list or how we rank them, and they will be labelled.
Corrections
Spotted a mistake? Use "Report an error" on any course page. We check the provider's page and fix it, and changes show up on New this week.
Our crawler
Our automated checks identify themselves as ai-courses.ie-bot/1.0 (+https://ai-courses.ie/methodology/#bot). The crawler obeys robots.txt and crawl-delay, makes at most one request every two seconds per site, never logs in and never bypasses bot protection.