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Online course creation has become a booming business, with the e-learning industry projected to reach $370 billion by 2026. Many course creators have successfully turned their experience in a particular niche into a thriving opportunity for growing a business through online teaching.
And, like so many other industries, course creation is poised to be disrupted by AI. In fact, with several tools already introduced with a specific focus on course creation, the question on creators’ minds shouldn’t be if they’ll use AI, but when and how.
Related: 4 Lesser Known Ways to Make Your Online Course More Impactful
1. AI can help you come up with content ideas
Not sure what topic you should cover for your next course? AI can significantly enhance your own brainstorming efforts, in large part thanks to its ability to analyze big data and utilize predictive analytics to help course creators determine whether a topic is appealing to their audience.
By using AI to generate ideas for course content, and to assess the viability of a potential course, creators can focus their efforts on the topics that will be the most relevant and engaging to drive sign-ups and revenue.
2. AI can provide course outlines
AI can also assist in the creation of your courses by helping you quickly develop lesson outlines. AI can build an outline based on key instructions such as the course’s description, main talking points and target audience. It can even account for the audience’s knowledge or skill level to help you craft content for beginners or experts.
While course creators must fill in the details of the course based on their own expertise, using AI to create an outline provides an important foundation that will help you put together a well-organized course with a logical flow of information. This will make it easier to develop your course content, while also ensuring your course delivers real value to online learners.
3. Teaching AI can be a powerful course itself
Among the many content ideas that AI can help you come up with, it’s worth considering how learning to use AI tools can become a viable course topic itself.
For example, according to a case study from Business Insider, Chris Winfield developed a series of paid online challenges to teach AI use cases to other business owners. At the end of each challenge, participants who wanted more support could sign up for courses and mastermind programs. From January to September 2023, Winfield had over 40,000 paid challenge participants, with the challenges and courses reaching $2.7 million in sales.
With so much demand for learning to use AI, teaching about AI applications relevant to your niche could be a powerful revenue generation tool.
Related: Creators Shouldn’t Overlook These Powerful Uses for AI Like ChatGPT
4. AI can generate quizzes and other course materials
A quality course is about more than just the core materials. For example, quizzes and tests have been found to improve long-term retention of new information. Creating quizzes for your course can be a time-consuming task, but AI can be trained to quickly generate quiz questions based on the material you’ve developed for your course. Because the quiz questions are drawn directly from your course content, you can have confidence that they will align with what you teach.
Visual aids can also be a powerful tool that makes digital courses more engaging. AI can help you find relevant images, create graphs and charts based on written course materials and more. For courses with audio or video content, AI can help create transcripts to better meet the needs of all learners.
5. Manage “back office” tasks
A successful career as a course creator involves more than the courses themselves. Data entry, tracking course sign-ups, managing email and other activities are all necessary parts of a successful course creation business, but they can be unnecessarily time-consuming. The repetitive nature of these tasks also makes them more prone to human error, which can become surprisingly costly.
In fact, an analysis by the New York Post found that workers make an average of 118 mistakes at work per year, with distractions, stress and multitasking often to blame. By outsourcing repetitive tasks to AI, you can greatly reduce the risk for errors with these repetitive tasks, while also enjoying more time to focus on other aspects of your course creation business.
With AI’s help, you can devote more time to creating high-quality courses and connecting with your students, which will lead to further business growth.
Related: How to Make a Real Difference Teaching Online Courses
6. AI can provide 24/7 help to students
Chatbots can also be a helpful AI addition to your course creation toolkit. After all, e-learning participants may have additional questions about course materials or need support at times when you’re not available.
Adding an AI chatbot tool to your course not only gives students 24/7 assistance, but it can also help resolve simpler questions and requests in a timely manner. This way, you’ll only need to worry about helping learners with more complex issues, which can be a valuable time-saver.
AI cannot fully replace the human element in course creation. After all, your specific knowledge, insights and personality are essential parts of creating course materials that connect with and provide value to students. However, AI can be a powerful tool for course creators, helping you work more efficiently so you can turn your courses into a viable business.
