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Online course creation has become a booming business, with the e-learning industry expected to reach $370 billion by 2026. Many course creators have successfully parlayed their expertise into a particular niche into a thriving opportunity to grow a business through online teaching.
And, like so many other industries, course creation is set to be disrupted by artificial intelligence. Indeed, with several tools already introduced with a specific focus on course creation, the question on creators’ minds should not be whether they will use AI, but when and how.
Related: 4 lesser-known ways to make your online course more effective
1. AI can help you come up with content ideas
Not sure what topic you should cover for your next course? AI can significantly improve your brainstorming efforts, largely due to its ability to analyze big data and use predictive analytics to help course creators determine whether a topic is appealing to their audience .
By using AI to generate course content ideas and evaluate the feasibility of a potential course, creators can focus their efforts on the topics that will be most relevant and engaging to increase enrollments and revenue.
2. Artificial intelligence can provide course guidelines
AI can also help you create your courses by helping you quickly develop lesson plans. AI can create an outline based on key statements such as the course description, key talking points, and target audience. It can also take into account your audience’s knowledge or skill level to help you create content for beginners or experts.
While course creators need to enter course details based on their expertise, using AI to create a structure 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 ensuring that your course offers real value to online students.
3. Teaching AI can be a powerful course in 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 itself become a valuable course topic.
For example, according to a Business Insider case study, Chris Winfield developed a series of paid online challenges to teach AI use cases to other entrepreneurs. At the end of each challenge, participants who wanted more support could sign up for mastermind courses and programs. From January to September 2023, Winfield had over 40,000 paid challenge participants, with challenges and courses reaching $2.7 million in sales.
With so much demand to learn how to use AI, teaching AI applications relevant to your niche could be a powerful revenue-generating tool.
Related: Creators shouldn’t overlook these powerful uses of AI like ChatGPT
4. AI can generate quizzes and other course materials
A quality course isn’t just about the basic materials. For example, quizzes and tests have been found to improve long-term retention of new information. Creating quizzes for your course can be time-consuming, but AI can be trained to quickly generate questions based on the material you’ve developed for your course. Because the quiz questions are taken directly from the course content, you can be confident 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 students.
5. Manage “back office” activities.
A successful career as a course creator involves more than the courses themselves. Data entry, tracking course enrollments, email management, and other tasks 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 be surprisingly costly.
In fact, a New York Post analysis found that workers make an average of 118 mistakes at work per year, often attributable to distractions, stress and multitasking. By outsourcing repetitive tasks to AI, you can significantly reduce the risk of errors with these repetitive tasks, while enjoying more time to focus on other aspects of your course creation business.
With the help of AI, you can spend more time creating high-quality courses and connecting with your students, which will lead to further business growth.
Related: How to make a real difference by teaching online courses
6. AI can provide 24/7 help to students
Chatbots can also be a useful AI addition to your course creation toolkit. After all, e-learning participants may have additional questions about the course materials or need support in times when you are not available.
Adding an AI chatbot tool to your course not only provides students with 24/7 support but can also help resolve simpler questions and requests in a timely manner. This way, you only have to worry about helping students with more complex problems, which can be a valuable time saver.
Artificial intelligence cannot completely 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 profitable business.