Anthropic Academy and Claude Academy: which free Claude course to take first

What Claude Academy and Anthropic Academy are

Claude Academy is Anthropic’s learning site at academy.claude.com. Its front page describes the content as free courses, tutorials and use cases from Anthropic’s education team, with a section for each of five products: Claude, Claude Cowork, Claude Code, Claude Tag and the Claude Platform.¹

The name Anthropic Academy belongs to a second official site: a course catalog at anthropic.skilljar.com, titled “Anthropic Courses” and labeled Anthropic Academy in its navigation. Skilljar is the learning platform that hosts the material. You sign in with a Skilljar account, and you don’t need an Anthropic account to take the courses there.² Most courses appear on both sites.²³ So don’t agonize over the site. Pick the course.

Is it free, and do you get a certificate?

The courses are free. Claude Academy says so on its front page, and Anthropic’s Claude Code documentation calls them free, self-paced courses.¹⁴ A course page, like the one for Claude Code 101, lists the lessons, the quiz and the hours, has a Start course button and saves your progress once you sign in.⁵

What you get at the end depends on the course. On Claude Academy, most courses with a quiz list a completion badge.³ The Skilljar catalog says it tracks your progress and quiz scores so Anthropic can issue completion certificates.² Either way, it shows that you finished a course. It isn’t a certification.

Anthropic does sell certification exams, such as Claude Certified Architect – Foundations, which tests Claude Code, the Claude Agent SDK, the Claude API and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Those exams live on a separate site, Anthropic Partner Academy.⁶

One cost to plan for: the course is free, the product may not be. Claude Code 101 recommends a Claude Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise account or an API key.⁵ Claude Code is included in all paid plans, but not in the Free plan.⁷

Every Anthropic course, grouped by who it’s for

Claude Academy sorts its courses into five groups: “Start your journey”, “Learn the products”, “Become AI fluent”, “AI Fluency, for your world” and “Build with the API”.³ Here’s the same catalog by audience, with the lesson counts and hours the site shows.

A few names in that table need a word. Claude Cowork is for briefing Claude on a multi-step task, stepping away and coming back to results to review. Claude Tag brings Claude into Slack, so a team can delegate work in the open.¹ Most AI Fluency courses teach Anthropic’s 4D framework: Delegation, Description, Discernment and Diligence.⁸ Catalogs like this change, so check the site before you plan around one title.

What a course looks like

Claude Code 101 is a typical example: 12 lessons in four parts (what Claude Code is, your first prompt, daily workflows, customizing Claude Code) and a quiz at the end. The last part covers CLAUDE.md, subagents, skills, MCP and hooks.⁵ Besides courses, Claude Academy publishes tutorials and use cases. Its full resource list showed 315 entries when we checked.⁸

Which Claude course should you take first?

1. Match the course to the tool you’ll open tomorrow. Chat window: Claude 101, which goes from your first conversation and prompting to projects, artifacts, skills and connected tools.⁸ Terminal or code editor: Claude Code 101. Your own app: Claude Platform 101.³
2. Read the prerequisites. Claude Code 101 expects basic familiarity with a code editor and the command line, and assumes no prior experience with AI tools.⁵
3. Budget real time. The starter courses run 1.5 to 2.5 hours, the API courses 8 to 9 hours.³ Two short sessions beat one marathon.
4. Use it within a week. Pick one real task and do it with Claude while the lessons are still fresh.

After the basics: build one real project

Courses hand you the map. A project makes you walk it. The moment you have to finish something, you hit the parts no lesson covers: vague instructions, a file in the wrong place, a result that’s almost right.

A good first project has four traits:

• A clear finish line: a file that opens, a page that loads, a video that plays.
• A small scope. One evening, not one month.
• A reason to care, so you actually finish it.
• A result you have to check, so you practice reviewing Claude’s work instead of just accepting it.

For Claude Code, a short video ticks all four boxes. It uses the skills Claude Code 101 teaches, from writing a CLAUDE.md file to reviewing what Claude changed,⁵ and you judge the result in seconds: you press play.

Claude Code can carry most of the work because it reads your project, edits files and runs commands.⁴ Rendering a video is just one more command.

That’s the project our course is built around. Explain It in 60 shows you how to turn a question into a reel: Claude writes a plan with sourced facts, three hook options and a script of roughly 150 to 170 words, an AI voice reads it and returns a timestamp for every word, and Claude builds 3D scenes that land each image on its word before it renders a vertical 1080 × 1920 MP4.

For that project you need a paid Claude plan with Claude Code (the desktop app works) and an ElevenLabs account for the voice. New to the tool? Our Claude Code tutorial for beginners gets you set up, and Can Claude make videos? answers the obvious next question. When you’re ready, see how to make 3D explainer reels with Claude Code.