Vanderbilt's Jules White treats prompting as a skill with repeatable patterns rather than a bag of tricks. The course works through concrete techniques — the persona pattern, few-shot prompting, and structured approaches — with plenty of examples. A well-structured, genuinely useful introduction to getting more from ChatGPT and similar tools.
Good for: Learning reliable, repeatable prompting techniques for LLMs.
Less suitable if: You want to build applications with the API rather than write prompts.
Requirements: None; access to ChatGPT (a free tier works) to practise.
Realistic time: Around 15–18 hours over a few weeks.
About this course
Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT, from Vanderbilt's Jules White, treats prompting as a skill with repeatable patterns rather than a bag of tricks. It works through concrete techniques — the persona pattern, few-shot prompting, templates, and ways to make the model reason step by step — using plenty of worked examples you can copy and adapt.
What you'll learn
Write clearer, more specific prompts that get usable results
Apply reusable prompt patterns like persona and few-shot
Get the model to reason step by step for harder tasks
Use templates to standardise repeated prompting tasks
Combine prompts into multi-step workflows
Recognise and work around common model failure modes
This course includes
Yes
Certificate
Yes
Mobile access
English
Language
What it costs
You can audit the course free on Coursera. A certificate needs a Coursera subscription (about $49/month) or Coursera Plus, with financial aid available.
Comparison · LBS
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A Vanderbilt certificate on Coursera is a credible learning record. Prompt engineering has no official certification, so its value is the skills rather than the certificate.
Last updated
AI tools move quickly; check that the course has been kept current, though the pattern-based techniques it teaches age well.
Instructor
JW
Jules White
Coursera instructor
Jules White is a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University whose prompt-engineering teaching became some of the most popular AI content on Coursera. He's known for a pattern-based approach that's easy to apply without a technical background.