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: Videos and images cannot currently be uploaded through an AI assistant. Upload these files directly from the Gradual Dashboard. Other areas of your community, including members, events, and site design, should also be managed from the Dashboard.

Before you can build courses, you’ll need to connect a supported AI assistant to your Gradual community.

The exact connection steps depend on the AI assistant you’re using. You’ll be asked to connect your Gradual community and approve access using your Gradual admin account.

Once access is approved, your AI assistant can work with the courses in your community.

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.

Lessons must be published before learners can access them as part of a published course.

When you’re ready to make the full course available, you can ask your AI assistant to handle the publishing sequence:

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

Once published, the course is available to eligible learners in your community according to the course’s access settings.

You can also review and manage the published course directly from the Gradual Dashboard.

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.