Course Redesign: AI Draft to a Course People Finish

A worked redesign that shows how I turn an AI-generated course into one people finish. The course, presenting skills for professionals, was written for this demo. The method is the one I use on client courses.

An AI tool produced a presenting-skills course of 8 modules, 28 lessons and about 7 hours of material. It read well, but it scored 6 out of 24 on my six learning-design criteria:

Topics, not skills: no module said what the learner would be able to do

Theory first: two full modules before anyone planned or practised a talk

No practice and no checkpoints, so neither learner nor creator could see progress

Built to be abandoned: seven self-paced hours with nothing to bring people back in week 3

Hard language that lost busy and non-native learners

A one-sentence course promise: in 4 weeks you'll plan and deliver a 5-minute work presentation, and have the recording to prove it

Four outcomes written as things a learner can do and show

4 modules and 12 lessons, about 3 hours in total, with practice inside every lesson

Checkpoints run from a 60-second baseline recording on day one to a 5-minute capstone talk, each scored on a 4-level rubric. Learners see what "secure" looks like before they record, so the final talk is a goal they can plan for.

A cohort rhythm: monthly start dates with a 4-week schedule

One short discussion prompt per lesson

A catch-up path for anyone who misses a week

Progress emails on days 3, 10, 17 and 24, each linked to the next small task

A plain-English pass on every script: shorter sentences, everyday words and one idea per sentence

AI tools are good at producing content and weak at design. This redesign keeps the useful content and adds what moves completion: clear outcomes, practice, feedback and a reason to come back.

The 6-page redesign is free on my profile: download the course redesign sample. To have your own course reviewed or rebuilt, see Course Teardown or Course Design Sprint.