Introduction

Building a complete online course – from a high-level outline, detailed lesson plans, to clear learning objectives – often requires a significant amount of time and effort. However, with the support of AI, you can automate nearly the entire process, saving time while maintaining quality and consistency across your content.

In this guide, you will learn how to:

• Create a well-structured course outline with clear chapters and lessons
• Build detailed lesson plans, including content, examples, quizzes, and supporting materials
• Define specific learning objectives that make it easy to track learner progress
• Import everything directly into the Ourdemy Course Builder, a platform that helps you manage, organize, and publish courses in a professional and convenient way

As a result, you can focus more on teaching and engaging with learners, while AI and Ourdemy take care of content organization and course management.

1. Benefits of Using AI for Course Planning

Using AI to plan your course brings many practical benefits for instructors and content creators:

🔹 Time-saving

Instead of spending hours manually creating each part, AI can automatically generate outlines, lesson plans, and learning objectives in just a few minutes, allowing you to focus on teaching and content optimization.

🔹 Logical and well-structured course design

AI organizes sections and lessons in a clear, logical sequence, ensuring learners can easily absorb knowledge from basic to advanced levels, making the course coherent and professional.

🔹 Comprehensive content coverage

AI helps ensure that no learning objective is overlooked, including theory, illustrative examples, hands-on exercises, quizzes, and interactive activities—ultimately improving overall course quality.

🔹 Easy import into Ourdemy

Content is standardized by section and lesson, making it fully compatible with the Ourdemy Course Builder, so importing and arranging your course becomes fast and seamless.

🔹 Learner personalization

AI can generate lesson plans based on skill level (beginner / intermediate / advanced) or specific target audiences, ensuring learners receive a tailored learning experience and maximizing learning effectiveness.

2. Step-by-step Process

Step 1: Prepare Course Information

Before using AI to plan your course, you should collect and clearly define the core information to ensure the AI-generated content is accurate, logical, and relevant:

1. Course title Example: “Excel from Beginner to Advanced”
2. Overall course objective Example: “Learners will be able to confidently use key Excel tools to solve real-world work tasks”
3. Target learners Clearly define who the course is for: students, office workers, fresh graduates, etc., so the AI can tailor content to their level and needs.
4. Expected number of sections This helps AI organize content into logical parts, from foundational to advanced topics.
5. Number of lessons per section Defining the number of lessons helps AI break content into manageable units, ensuring each lesson is concise and easy to understand.

💡 Tip: The more detailed and specific your input, the easier it is for AI to generate realistic outlines and lesson plans, reducing editing time and improving overall course quality.

Step 2: Generate a Course Outline with AI

Goal: Build a high-level structure for the entire course, including sections and lessons, giving you a clear overview before diving into the details of each lesson.

How to do it:

1. Open an AI tool: You can use ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI designed to support education.
2. Enter a sample prompt:
   • Create a course outline for “Excel from Beginner to Advanced” for students, including 5 sections, with 3 lessons per section. List the section titles and lesson names.
3. Review the AI-generated output: A list of Section 1 → Section 5 with their corresponding lessons.
4. Advanced option: Ask the AI to add short descriptions for each lesson (2–3 sentences) so you can import them directly into Ourdemy, helping learners understand the lesson content before starting.

💡 Tip: After receiving the outline, review the order and logic of the sections, making sure the content progresses from easy to difficult, is well connected, and aligns with the learner journey.

Step 3: Create detailed lesson plans for each lesson

Goal: Build in-depth content for each lesson, including learner activities, supporting materials, and lesson duration, helping learners absorb knowledge effectively and enjoy a smooth learning experience.

How to do it:

1. Select a lesson from the outline that you want to develop first.
2. Enter a prompt
   Example:
   • Create a detailed lesson plan for the lesson “Basic Functions in Excel.” Include:
     – Lesson duration
     – Key content
     – Learner activities (exercises, practice)
     – Supporting materials (slides, PDF, video)
3. Review the AI-generated output: The lesson plan will typically include:
   • Lesson introduction: Objectives and content overview.
   • Teaching activities: Step-by-step guidance with illustrative examples.
   • Practice exercises: Quizzes, applied tasks, or case studies.
   • Reference materials: Slides, PDFs, video links, or infographics.
4. Repeat for other lessons, or ask the AI to generate lesson plans for an entire section to save time.

💡 Tip: On Ourdemy, you can directly copy the lesson plan into the lesson description, upload slides, videos, and PDFs, and create a complete, seamless online lesson for learners.

Step 4: Define learning objectives for each lesson

Goal: Help learners clearly understand what they will learn and achieve after each lesson, while also providing a foundation for quizzes, assignments, and learning effectiveness evaluation.

How to do it:

1. Enter a prompt
   Example:
   • Write 3 learning objectives for the lesson “Basic Functions in Excel,” using action verbs from Bloom’s Taxonomy (e.g., analyze, apply, create).
2. Review the AI-generated output
   The AI will produce learning objectives that are clear, standardized, and easy to track, for example:
   • Apply basic Excel functions to process data.
   • Analyze simple datasets using formulas.
   • Create spreadsheets that illustrate real-world scenarios.

When imported into Ourdemy, learning objectives help learners clearly understand each lesson’s goals, while also enabling AI to suggest appropriate quizzes, exercises, and practical activities—ensuring an effective and comprehensive learning experience.

Step 5: Import into Ourdemy Course Builder

Goal: Transfer all AI-generated content into Ourdemy, ensuring a clear, well-structured course that is easy to manage and ready for learner access.

Note: Carefully review all sections, lessons, descriptions, and supporting materials to ensure a smooth and coherent learner experience.

Useful reference links for importing content into Ourdemy:

• https://ourdemy.com/what-do-i-need-to-create-a-free-course/
• https://ourdemy.com/whats-the-process-for-setting-up-a-paid-course/
• https://ourdemy.com/what-is-the-way-to-create-a-new-section-in-a-course/

3. Key Considerations When Using AI

• Review content logic and sequence: AI may arrange lessons or sections in a less-than-optimal order; always review to ensure a logical learning flow that is easy to follow.
• Quality control: Although AI generates content quickly, instructors should still proofread, refine wording, fix typos, and verify the accuracy of the information.
• Add examples and practice exercises: This increases practical applicability and helps learners gain a deeper understanding of the material.
• Personalize for target learners: Create lesson versions tailored to different levels (beginner / intermediate / advanced) or specific learner groups.
• Update regularly: AI mainly generates foundational outlines and lesson plans; instructors should continuously enhance and adjust content based on real learner feedback to improve course quality.

Conclusion

Building an online course has become easier, faster, more effective, and more professional than ever when you know how to leverage AI.

With just a few simple prompts, you can achieve significant results:

• Save time: Automatically generate content, suggest structures, and propose quizzes and exercises.
• Ensure consistency and quality: Lessons are presented in a logical, cohesive, and easy-to-follow manner.
• Enable easy personalization: Create lesson versions tailored to different skill levels or learner groups.

AI + Ourdemy is a powerful combination that allows instructors to focus on teaching and engaging with learners, while all course preparation, organization, and management tasks are handled intelligently and professionally.