The hardest part of creating a course isn't the knowledge — it's the blank page. Structuring lessons, writing content for each one, creating quizzes, finding supporting resources — all before you've published a single word. The AI Horizons Course Generator eliminates that friction. Here's what it does and how to use it.
What the AI Course Generator Does
The Course Generator is an AI-powered feature inside Course Studio that takes a course topic prompt and produces a complete course draft — not just an outline, but actual lesson content, quizzes, suggested videos, and a cover image.
The generation pipeline runs through several steps automatically:
1. Research: The AI researches your topic using a live search model (Perplexity), pulling in current information with citations. This ensures your course content is accurate and up to date, not just pulled from training data.
2. Content writing: For each lesson, the AI writes full lesson content — explanations, examples, key concepts — formatted as Course Studio text blocks ready to use.
3. Quiz generation: The AI creates quiz questions for each lesson — multiple choice with explanations, ordering exercises, or matching questions depending on the content type.
4. Video curation: Relevant YouTube videos are found and embedded as video blocks, giving learners additional resources without you having to search manually.
5. Image generation: A cover image for the course is generated using Vertex AI image generation, giving your course a professional visual identity from day one.
6. Review and refinement: After the initial draft, the AI reviews its own content for accuracy, clarity, and completeness — making improvements before presenting the draft to you.
The entire process takes a few minutes. What you receive is a structured course — multiple lessons, each with content, a quiz, and multimedia — ready for your review.
How to Use It
- Open Course Studio from your creator dashboard (requires Innovator or Visionary plan)
- Create a new course
- In the AI generation interface, enter your course topic and any context about your target audience and goals
- Review the generated draft as it builds section by section
- Edit, reorder, add your own expertise, and remove anything that doesn't fit
- Configure pricing and publish
The draft is a starting point, not a finished product. Your job is to bring your unique perspective, real-world examples, and practitioner knowledge to a structure that AI has built for you. The combination — AI speed plus human expertise — produces better courses faster than either approach alone.
What to Prompt For Best Results
The quality of the generated course depends significantly on the quality of your prompt. Vague prompts produce generic courses; specific prompts produce focused, useful ones.
Less effective: "Create a course on prompt engineering"
More effective: "Create a course on prompt engineering for marketing professionals who use AI for content creation, email campaigns, and social media. The audience has basic familiarity with ChatGPT but doesn't know advanced techniques. The course should be practical and outcome-focused — by the end, students should be able to write prompts that consistently produce publishable marketing copy."
Include:
- Who the course is for
- What they already know
- What you want them to be able to do after
- Any specific topics to include or emphasize
Editing the Generated Course
Every element of the generated course is fully editable in Course Studio:
- Rewrite any text block with your voice and examples
- Delete quiz questions that don't fit and add your own
- Replace suggested videos with better ones
- Reorder lessons if the generated structure doesn't match how you'd teach it
- Add blocks the AI didn't generate — interactive components, code examples, your own diagrams
The AI-generated course is scaffolding. You're the architect who decides what stays and what changes.
Pricing and Publishing
Once you're happy with the course, configure your settings:
- Set a price (free or a monthly subscription)
- Enable the 7-day free trial option
- Decide whether Visionary plan members get free access
- Add your course to a community if you have one
- Hit publish
The AI Course Generator is available on Innovator and Visionary plans. If you've been sitting on course ideas but haven't started because the blank page felt too daunting — this is how you start. Try it free for 7 days.
