Welcome to Part 2 of our deep dive into course creation using AI.

Before we begin

Today we’re going to be focusing on structuring and planning our online course.

This is a big and complex task but I’ve written an equally big and complex prompt to do the heavy lifting for you.

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Let’s get started:

Course Topic Selection

1. Length of course

Before we beginning structuring everything we need to know the length of the final course.

First question: do you want to make the course free?

Why would you want to make it free?

If you have other products/services or simply want to build up an audience then you can use a free course on Udemy to get to a lot of people. Then you take them from the course over to your social media and email list and sell them your other products and services.

Making the course free gets it into the hands of the most amount of people - thus driving your other business further down the line.

If you want to do this then the course has to be under 2 hours. That’s the limit for free courses on Udemy. So your course length should be 2 hours.

Don’t want the course to be free? No problem - here are the next considerations.

If you want the course itself to be the income generator then you can have any length of course.

If this is the case look at the length of the top selling courses in your Topic and replicate this.

In AI for instance they are all around 15 hours so for a paid course I’d go for around 15 hours.

A caveat to this : if your competitive analysis and perfect course guidelines (from Part 1) came up with suggestions to make your course longer or shorter then follow these suggestions.

The final thing to keep in mind is your time. A longer course will take longer to make- obviously! If this is your first course think about keeping it shorter at a couple of hours rather than a marathon 20 hours course!

In any case, for this step come up with a final number for how long you want the course to be. We’ll be using this to help structure the course.

2. Structure prompt

Using all of our work so far we can now plug into this chunky course structure prompt. I’ll work through it piece by piece after so you understand what’s going on here.

Use this prompt in your existing chat that contains data on the 5 competitor courses you analysed.

Why? Your perfect course guidelines will likely refer to the 5 competitors so use the same chat so that ChatGPT has sufficient context:

Act as an online course expert 

I'm preparing a course about [topic]. You will decide the Sections and Lessons this course will contain and build a course structure.

The course title is [title]

The total length of the course should be [total length]

The course structure should be split into Sections, each section containing multiple Lessons. Adjust as necessary to fulfill the total course length. Each section should end in a Quiz. 

Each lesson should be no more than 10 minutes. There should be 5-8 minimum lessons per section. Split the sections into multiple lessons accordingly, making sure to hit the total course length.

Make sure that the total course length adds up to the total length provided above. 

The course structure should follow these guidelines

#begin perfect course guidelines#
[paste perfect course guidelines]
#end perfect course guidelines#

Provide me with a course structure in tabular format containing:
Section, Lesson title, Brief description, Lesson learning outcome, length of lesson in minutes, total cumulative course length 

Plug in your Title, Topic, Total Length and the guidelines created in Part 1 about creating a perfect course.

Prompt Output 💬

ChatGPT will create a table of your course’s structure. This will be very long - so here’s just a sample of the top of my table:

3. Manual edit

Remember in the last Part where I suggested choosing a topic you are familiar with and have skill in? Here’s why.

Now you need to go through the structure you’ve been provided and give feedback to ChatGPT

For example in the image above I see a lesson called “Comparing GPT-4 and ChatGPT”.

That’s not a helpful lesson - GPT-4 is a version of ChatGPT which means this comparison isn’t a helpful one. I’d want to drop this lesson.

Go through your course structure and note the lessons you want to delete. For these tell ChatGPT to drop or delete these lessons.

For other sections and lessons you might want to reorder the content. Again, just type this into ChatGPT (“reverse the order of lesson x and lesson y”).

For some you may think ChatGPT hasn’t added enough detail or has too much detail. Ask it to add or subtract extra lessons until it’s a bit more balanced.

This editing process is crucial to make your course valuable and needs to be done by you, a human expert. Thankfully editing a course outline is much easier than creating it from scratch.

4. Flesh out details

Once you’ve got your basic structure in a place you are happy with we’re going to flesh out the details of each lesson.

We don’t want to do this before the editing as we’ll just end up with lots more information we need to get rid of later.

Use this nice simple prompt after your existing structure

For each lesson add 3 main content bullet points.

Add these into the existing table.

Prompt Output 💬

Here’s a snippet

This is a nice simple prompt that will give you more detail on each of the lessons that ChatGPT has added into the structure.

Again, go through and manually tweak, asking ChatGPT to add/delete or edit as required.

The more we do now with our structure the better our results in tomorrow’s Part 3 where we start to generate content.

Pulling it together

Today has been a big day but hopefully the one large prompt I’ve provided will do a lot of the heavy lifting.

You still had to edit based on your own knowledge but doing so is easier than working from a blank page.

And rest assured that any editing work you’ve just done will pay back dividends in the next Part when we start to generate content. The more specific and focused your structure the more unique and engaging our final course content.

Speaking of - that’s tomorrow’s topic! For that, I’ll see you tomorrow!

This week

Part 1: Course Topic Selection

Part 2: Course Structure

Part 3: Course Scripts

Part 4: Course recording and editing

Part 5: Course marketing

Keep prompting,

Kyle