AI Can Build Your Course in a Day. That Doesn't Mean It Will Work.
There's a video I keep seeing on Instagram. A music teacher sings a gentle song and floats a silk scarf through the air while her students follow along, calm and focused. At the end, she softly balls the scarf up in her hand and blows it away. It's lovely. It's meant to help settle a class.
I've taught 3 and 4 year olds. They would absolutely love this. They would also be chasing scarves around the room within ten seconds, and I would spend the rest of class collecting silk.
I'm not knocking the teacher in the video. It probably works beautifully with her students, her style, in her room, on that day. But it's a perfect picture of something 24 years of teaching has taught me over and over: what looks good on paper doesn't always survive a real room.
It's never been easier to build a course
AI can outline a course in an afternoon. It can draft lessons, write quizzes, and script your videos. And honestly? The results are often pretty decent.
Online courses were hit or miss long before AI showed up. A Class Central analysis of massive open online courses found a median completion rate of 12.6%. AI has probably raised the floor. At least now the outline makes sense and the pieces hang together.
But easy to build is not the same as worth taking.
The gap between the plan and the room
Every year I'm handed curriculum documents full of beautiful, lofty language. Students will improvise on a simple pattern to understand the value of each individual within the group. Students will use music to express their feelings about social issues. Students will create compositions that give deeper meaning to their message.
I read those and think: How? When?
I'd love to have thoughtful discussions with my 5th graders. In a class of 25, I have about 5 who would be into it. Another 5 are busy messing around with each other. Five more believe that if it isn't the music they hear on TikTok, it isn't worth their time. Five barely speak English yet. And five simply won't engage.
These documents are written as if I'm a homeroom teacher who sees the same children most of the day, all year long. I see 12 different classes, each once a week for 35 minutes. Add behavior management, and there simply isn't the time or the relationship needed to dig as deep as those documents want.
I don't think the people who write them mean any harm. They mean well. But sometimes the people making the plans need to go back to the front lines to remember what the challenges are and what actually lands.
Online learners have their own version of my 35 minutes. Most of the people taking your course are working parents, career changers, and busy people trying to make their lives better, squeezing learning into the itty bitty spaces of their day. So the question isn't only "is my content good?" It's this: do you know what your learners are up against, and does your course remove those barriers or at least work within them?
AI doesn't know your learners. It has never watched the room.
Human review isn't proofreading
Here's something I've noticed. Even the companies selling AI course tools say you still need human review. One 2026 roundup of AI course tools says human review is still important to ensure accuracy, tone, and relevance.
That's true, but it's only half the job. Checking that something is correct is proofreading. Checking that it makes sense to a learner is teaching.
When I review courses, the same problems keep showing up. Steps jump from 2 to 5, or they're so tiny that learners get bored. One module is packed while the next is thin. Ideas show up out of order, so learners are asked to use something they haven't learned yet. None of these are typos. A course can be accurate, polished, and well written, and still not work.
These are the questions a teacher asks:
Does it flow?
Do learners get hands-on practice, not just information?
Is there time to reflect?
When they finish, do they have the transformation they signed up for?
I can't tell you how many lessons I've planned that fell flat. It happened less and less over the years, but I only learned to see those problems by living through them. That experience is what I bring to someone else's course.
Connection is the part AI can't build
One more thing AI can't generate for you: people.
Ruzuku, an online course platform, looked at its own data from more than 32,000 courses. Courses with discussion features had 65% completion, compared with 43% without. They called it the single biggest lever they'd found in fourteen years of running the platform. Not shorter videos. Not better slides. People talking to each other.
Readers can also sense when the human is missing. In one study, messages that were disclosed as written with ChatGPT received lower ratings for sincerity and caring. If your course promises transformation, sincerity and caring are the whole point.
Don't let AI take your voice
When AI writes your whole course, it starts to sound like every other course out there. There's research on this too. In a 2024 study published in Science Advances, writers who had access to AI story ideas produced stories rated as more creative, better written, and more enjoyable, but those stories were also more similar to each other than stories written by people alone. Each writer came out ahead. Collectively, everything started to sound the same.
Now, I'm not talking to the people churning out cheap courses to make a quick buck. I am not your person. Those people drive me nuts, and I hate that they flood the market with junk.
I'm talking to you. The one with something real to share, who wants to see your students grow because of what you taught them. Don't let AI take your voice from you.
For the record, I use AI. (I've written about that before.) I often write in a stream of consciousness and use AI to help organize my thoughts. It's a great tool. Use it wisely, and make sure what comes out the other end still sounds like you.
So does your course actually work?
If you've built a course, with AI or without it, and you're not sure it will land with real learners, start here:
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