I have a confession to make.

I am addicted to free courses. (I know. I know.) Part of it is genuine curiosity - I love learning. But honestly? A big part of it is professional. How someone shows up in their free content tells you a lot about how they teach. A free course isn't just a lead magnet. It's a preview. It's a promise.

So there I was, a few weeks ago, taking a free course on marketing without social media. After the introduction, the instructor did something I wasn't expecting. She included a page - just one page - dedicated to the terms and phrases she would be using throughout the course.

I stopped scrolling and just sat with it for a moment.

This. This is what I've been saying more courses need.

I was helping a client design a workbook. She had sent me a previous one she had done so I had a sense of her style, which looked polished and clean. I was sending her my first drafts to make sure I was headed in the right direction for her vision.

At some point I explained that I had intentionally kept the writing spaces white rather than shaded, and why. Shaded looks great, but if someone prints it, writing over ink is annoying. And not everyone prints anymore. If you are working on an iPad or laptop you want to be able to type directly into the space without having to add text boxes over a finished design.

I almost left that explanation out. It felt like a small thing, maybe even overly fussy. But that kind of attention to detail is actually what makes me good at what I do. So I said it.

Let me tell you about the summer I got played.

I don't mean that harshly. Looking back, I can actually appreciate the craft of what happened. But in the moment? I was frustrated, out of money I didn't have to waste, and seriously questioning whether online courses were worth trusting at all.

It started with a career pivot. After spending a school year at a new school that made me realize I was done with the classroom - not with teaching, but with the classroom - I started looking for what came next. I used AI as my career counsellor, mapped my skills, and kept landing on the same answer: Virtual Assistant. Organized, tech-forward, flexible. It ticked every box.

So I started researching VA courses. Found one I liked. Reasonable price, good fit for a beginner. I was ready to buy.

And then someone found me first.

Everyone told me AI would change everything. And honestly? They weren't wrong. But not quite in the way they promised.

I remember the first time I asked AI to help me build something for a course. The response was impressive. Confident, thorough, fancy words, beautifully formatted. And then I looked closer. The ideas were fine. But they could have belonged to anyone. There was no trace of the person who was supposed to be teaching the course. No specific story, no hard-won insight, no voice.

That's when I started paying closer attention to what AI actually does well and what it's not so good at. Especially when we let it do too much.

Let me tell you about the time I spent way too long in Terminal trying to generate subtitles.