Build and Manage Courses with an AI Assistant

Once connected to Gradual, your AI assistant can help you build and manage courses without completing each step manually in the Dashboard.

You can use your AI assistant to:

Dashboard admins can use these course management capabilities. This follows the same course access model used when creating and managing courses directly from the Gradual Dashboard.

Note: Video and image files cannot be uploaded directly through MCP. Upload these files from your Gradual Dashboard. Other community features, including member management and site design, must also be managed from the Dashboard.

Before you can build courses with an AI assistant, make sure MCP is enabled for your Gradual community and that you have permission to manage courses.

Follow the instructions in ⁠Connect Your AI Assistant to Gradual Using MCP to connect and authorize your AI assistant.

Once connected, you can start creating and managing courses using natural language instructions.

You can ask your AI assistant to create individual parts of a course or build its overall structure for you.

For example:

Create a course called “Community Manager Onboarding” in the “Getting Started” category. Add three chapters: Welcome, Setting Up Your Community, and Launching Your First Event.

After the course is created, open Courses in your Gradual Dashboard to review the structure and make sure everything is organized as intended.

You can then continue adding content with more specific instructions, such as:

Add two lessons to the “Welcome” chapter.

Or:

Add a lesson called “Customize Your Community” to the “Setting Up Your Community” chapter.

For larger courses, start by creating the course structure, then build out individual lessons. This makes it easier to review and refine the content as you go.

Your AI assistant can create and manage the categories used to organize courses.

For example:

You can also ask the assistant to rename, reorder, or delete existing categories.

When creating a course in a specific category, include the category name in your instructions so the course is placed in the correct location.

Once your course is created, you can add, update, remove, and reorder its chapters and lessons.

When making changes, identify the course and chapter whenever necessary. For example:

This gives the assistant a clear destination for the new content, especially when a course contains multiple chapters.

You can also ask the assistant to reorder existing content:

Quizzes can be added and configured through your AI assistant.

For example:

Add a five-question quiz to the end of the “Getting Started” chapter.

You can then ask the assistant to update individual questions, change their order, or remove questions as you refine the quiz.

Review the completed quiz in the Dashboard before publishing it to learners.

Keep the Gradual Dashboard open while building your course so you can review changes as they’re made.

After completing a section of the course, refresh the Dashboard and review:

If something isn’t where you expected, give your assistant a specific instruction describing what should change.

Before publishing a course, make sure its lessons are published so learners can access the content.

You can ask your AI assistant to publish the lessons and course in the correct order.

For example:

Publish all lessons in the “Community Onboarding” course, then publish the course.

Once published, the course will be available to eligible learners based on its access settings.

Open the course in your Gradual Dashboard to review its publication status and confirm that the content is available as intended.

For the best results, build larger courses in stages rather than asking the assistant to generate an entire course at once.

Start with the overall structure:

Create a course with four chapters and add the lesson titles for each chapter.

Then work through the course chapter by chapter:

Write the content for the first lesson in Chapter 1.

Review each section in the Dashboard before moving on to the next one. This gives you more control over the course content and makes it easier to adjust the structure along the way.

When requesting changes, include the names of the course, chapter, or lesson you’re referring to. Specific instructions help ensure updates are applied to the right content.

Here’s one way to build a complete course using an AI assistant.

1. Create the category

Create a course category called “Getting Started.”

2. Create the course structure

Create a course called “Community Onboarding” in the “Getting Started” category. Add three chapters: Welcome, Setting Up Your Community, and Next Steps.

3. Add lessons

Add two lessons to each chapter.

Review the course structure in the Gradual Dashboard and make any necessary adjustments.

4. Add a quiz

Add a five-question quiz to the “Welcome” chapter.

5. Review the course

Open the course in your Dashboard and review its lessons, quiz questions, and content order.

6. Publish

Publish all lessons in the “Community Onboarding” course, then publish the course.

Once published, eligible learners can access the course from your community’s Courses page.