10 Ways AI Will Change Online Courses in the Next 5 Years

In this episode, Chris Badgett explains how AI will significantly reshape online courses by making creation faster, cheaper, and more accessible, while also increasing competition and lowering average quality due to an influx of generic AI-generated content. He emphasizes that although those who use AI as a co-pilot, combining it with their own brand, voice, and expertise, will stand out and deliver higher-quality courses, those who rely solely on AI will suffer.

He highlights that the value of information diminishes as it gets simpler to provide, and the true premium moves to human components like coaching, community, accountability, and change. AI will also make it possible for more flexible course delivery, intelligent student assistance, and customized learning experiences.

AI may serve as a tutor by assisting students, bridging knowledge gaps, and dynamically modifying curriculum. Additionally, operational and student support systems will become more sophisticated, with AI assistants proactively assisting students, providing real-time answers to inquiries, and even stepping in when students are ready to lose interest.

It will be crucial for creators to post public material and maintain visibility as marketing and discovery grow more competitive and move toward AI-driven platforms. Additionally, Chris promotes openness and human supervision while cautioning about ethical issues, including authenticity, false information, and data privacy. Ultimately, his main point is that creating a comprehensive, AI-augmented education company with a human connection at its core is more important for success in the AI future than simply selling courses.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. My name’s Chris, and today we’re gonna do a solo episode. We’re gonna talk about AI and course creation, but it’s gonna be a little different than probably what you’ve been thinking already or what you’re already seeing happening. We’re gonna look into the future and look at 10 ways.

AI is gonna be different in the life of the course creator. What’s gonna change in the course creation economy because of ai, things are already changing. Things are already happening now, but we’re gonna look a little further out into the future. And the reason this is important is when you think about.

How AI is changing online education. It opens up opportunities for you. It also creates risks for you. So the more that we can see what’s next and get a feel for what’s coming, the better we can prepare to take advantage of the opportunities and remove the risks. Where are we at today? AI is already here.

It’s also not something that is equally. Used or distributed. There’s early adopters, certain types of people who are leveraging and using AI a lot more than others. Some may not even be using it at all as course creators, but most techie folks are in some ways experience experimenting, playing with ai, using it at work.

So in terms of course creation, we’re already seeing course creators. Use AI to help create outlines, to create lesson drafts or talking points for slides, or even slides themselves. Create quiz questions from a body of material to do support in some ways with chatbots. We’re using AI and video editing.

This podcast is actually edited in a tool called DE Script, which has AI video editing we’ve been using for a long time. People are using AI in marketing copy, and, but still most course, creators are under using it. This is like the early days of email marketing or social media and even online courses themselves.

So the first prediction I have for you of what’s coming in the next five years with AI and course creation is that. Course creation is gonna get a lot faster. Cheaper. Cheaper and easier. This is good and bad. It’s bad because it lowers the barrier to entry so that kind of, anyone can create a course. But it’s good for people who are not trying to replace themselves entirely by ai, but they use it to create a small team effect so that they can get things done faster.

Video editing curriculum, design, lesson content, using AI to accelerate those things. Course creation gets faster and cheaper. The next prediction I have for you is that average course quality goes down but the top tier gets a lot better because of ai. So the, low end of the, course creation market actually gets worse.

And the reason that is, is that course creators will, or entrepreneurs will chase opportunities and create what’s known as AI slop and just see an opportunity, oh, here’s a hot topic. I’m gonna have AI a hundred percent make a course for me and I’m gonna sell it. And it’s gonna sound like every other generic AI generated course.

On that topic. So the low end course creation, because of the barrier to entry, is actually going to get worse. We’re gonna get flooded with more and more lower quality AI slop content. We’re already seeing this on social media and YouTube where AI content is flooding. And so it creates more noise but the creators at the top end of the market who are leveraging AI in an intelligent way are actually creating even better courses, higher production value videos, websites, and so on.

The next prediction I have is that. The personal brand aspect becomes even more important in the future of online education or as an education entrepreneur. So personal brand has always been a thing. You have one, whether you choose to accept that idea or not. I’ve always been a big fan of not hiding behind a website and really putting yourself out there as much as you can.

In your online education business as a teacher, as a coach, as an entrepreneur, as a topic brand personality, all these things are really important. They’re just becoming more and more important. Humans have never been more lonely and isolated because of technology. So the desire to connect in an educational format with a real human and not just with robots and artificial intelligence is only gonna increase.

Your personal brand really matters, and even if you’re augmenting yourself with AI to be more productive increase your production value and so on. I recommend just keeping that personal aspect of you in the business and that could be things like just having an, even if you use a lot of AI in creating your course, you could have an ask me anything office hours once, a once a month, and that keeps the human in, that keeps the personal brand strong do not let AI slowly take over your everything and now your personal brand is completely gone from your online education company. The next piece related to the human side is that coaching community and accountability becomes more premium in the course creator education offer stack. So what I mean by that is as content becomes more and more commoditized with ai, it’s the other aspects of learning, the coaching, the community, the accountability systems, the peer-to-peer connection the masterminding if you will, the social learning things like memberships, cohorts.

Private communities certifications that include a, human aspect of certifying this. This makes premium content in the future. So information at the end of the day wants to be free. And what I mean by that is your course content, the information in your training. There’s much pressure on that.

The, just the info part of what you do is a, in some ways a commodity. You can have unique ideas and unique insights and blend unique things together, but at the end of the day, information wants to be free and in an AI world, which is unlocking information at scale the things that are valuable going forward or add more value or premium value.

Are the human things. That’s the private coaching, the group coaching, the online and in-person communities, the event-based learning, any kind of social learning or certification and continuing education that requires a human component. This is why we have all those great tools in lifter LMS, so that. You can, what we’ve said since the beginning of lift drill LMS is you can scale the human touch with robotics.

We’ve always said that, and what that means is even before AI was a big deal, we believe that the technology of building a website, using WordPress, using lift drill LMS will accelerate you, but you are still a human in the machine and we are scaling the human, not replacing the human. So my next prediction is that personalized learning will become the new standard.

So what this looks like, some call it adaptive learning, but essentially if we look back to the old in-person classroom education style learning is not very personalized. There’s a teacher in front of the class, it’s one to many. There’s instruction and mass, everybody’s hearing the same thing at the same time, at the same pace, taking the same tests.

What personalized learning is where and this is where AI provides a big opportunity and unlock, is the learning can adapt to the learner. So if there’s knowledge gaps that one individual’s having. The AI tutor as an example, could revisit concepts until that knowledge gap is filled or could adjust quizzing and knowledge assessments based on that learner’s strengths and weaknesses to make sure whatever the gaps are filled.

So how does it, what does this look like? It looks like having a, let’s say, a AI tutor on the site. Or even just some kind of monitoring that’s happening, that’s looking at the progress tracking and the grades and the reporting and the content consumption. How much of a video has been watched and so on, where the AI can help guide that learner to more content if they need to, fill in some foundations before they move forward, or if there’s some kind of competency that’s already met.

That learner can move forward and move on into something new, something else. So personalized learning is becoming more and more powerful and possible with ai. If you think about it this way, in the old days, there were like three TV channels on a television. If you were lucky enough to have a TV and now.

There’s unlimited content on the internet and there’s all these algorithms and AI running in social media or YouTube as an example, just feeding you and adapting to you the type of content that you like to watch or sh have shown interest in. That same thing has not progressed as far in education, but now it is.

It’s happening. And we’re just gonna see more and more personalized learning. The next thing that’s gonna really change with AI and education is the student support and the operations of education of the classroom. So what do I mean by that? Think of. An AI tutor. Think about AI agents or assistants or bots that are available to or questions or to proactively help in the tutor context or nudge based on progress.

If you think of something like an exit intent popup, by the way, if you’re not using popup maker, you should definitely use that to get more engagement, sales and retention on your lift LMS powered site. But there’s this concept with a popup called an exit intent. So what happens is when the mouse is going to the top left corner to leave.

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Speaker: A webpage that creates a trigger that causes a popup. So you can put whatever you want in the message to get people to stay or use a coupon code and complete their purchase. But that kind of, thing applied to learning. You can actually do this with pop-up maker. If someone’s trying to exit a lesson, you can throw a up to encourage them to stay.

That’s something you can do with pop-up maker. But now imagine an AI assistant is there notice somebody’s about to abandon the training that they’re supposed to be doing or said they wanted to do. And not only can we throw a popup or a message, we could actually immediately initiate a conversation.

That’s the power of AI in terms of responding to user behavior on the site. It’s, it basically creates a better learning experience that’s much more scalable. So it’s like AI student support. Ai, LMS Automat automation. So again, we’re scaling the human touch with robotics. There is a lot we wanna do with automation and robotics and artificial intelligence, and having helpful AI assistance in the learning experience.

Is, or we’re just gonna see more and more of that. And if you think about how that might change in traditional education I could see the role of the teacher changing to be more of a facilitator and a coach than how they currently work, as an example. So as some of the more operations side of.

Education folds into artificial intelligence. The human teacher can be there to more facilitate a process, hold space, provide the human connection even help improve AI systems and so on. But at the end of the day, keeping the humanity in the education will always be important. So in terms of. AI in the future.

My next prediction for you is that the marketing side of online courses is gonna get even more competitive. So gone are the early days of online courses where if you happen to be early and you really put up a quality course on a topic, and nobody else had done it. You could scale huge, particularly on a platform like Udemy.

In the early days I saw people teaching basic Excel courses making millions of dollars as an example. But as this market gets more and more saturated as artificial intelligence accelerates the marketing and advertising of courses, coaching programs, membership sites and so on, it’s just.

It’s gonna get more noisy and harder to stand out. So folks are using AI for their blogs, for making video content, writing emails. Some of the ai innovations in the paid advertising department that are happening right now are really interesting. And in five years I having an AI. Run your ad campaigns and optimize them over time is awesome, but you’re still gonna need to be a human and participate in all that.

So AI doesn’t, it doesn’t remove the need for marketing. What it does is it punishes lazy marketing. So if you just create AI slop blog posts with a very lightweight SEO strategy. And you don’t even edit the posts or put your personal touch on it. That’s AI slop. That kind of garbage in, garbage out is not gonna be productive from a marketing standpoint.

But those that use AI for ideation, repurposing SEO optimizations, funnel optimization. Testing, split tests playing with hooks and offers and all these things. This is where AI really shines I just wanna throw a plug out there. I use a AI tool called Ojo that’s at ojo.ai. And what’s cool about that is one of, I’ve been in internet marketing for about 20 years now.

It’s a couple decades. And one of the early internet marketers I followed, his name was Frank Kern. He’s a great marketer, direct response copywriter interesting guy. He’s done a lot of different things in marketing and information products and ads and all the rest. But a, marketer like Frank, you could probably hire him and pay him like $30,000 to write one sales page for you or.

What you could do is, and this is fairly recent, within the last year, you could pay $50 a month for his AI tool that has been trained on how he thinks and his style and his structure of copywriting and creating marketing, advertising, communications, messaging that works and converts. I love using that tool and it’s not like I just put a quick prompt and out comes a sales page.

It’s I, won’t say annoying to work with. It’s just time consuming because if you’re gonna do a sales page with ojo.ai, as much as Frank would like to say it’s easy, saves you a bunch of time, which it does do all those things. It’s gonna ask you like 20 questions and dig into you’re, you have to talk to it for about 30 minutes at least to come up with a good sales page.

But once you put in that work and you really jam with it as the human and tell your story and your voice and all these things, the actual sales page content is pretty awesome. So that’s but it’s not lazy. It’s not like a one-shot prompt to chat GBT. Hey, build me a sales page about my. Course, and here’s, the, here are the lessons in the course, and you’re done.

It’s not like that. It’s, much much more in depth. So use AI to co-pilot, not to replace you. Another trend that we’re gonna see more of is that search and discovery. Is gonna change dramatically beyond traditional Google, SEO. So what do I, mean about Google? SEO? For those who are early adopters of ai, you will have noticed that you use things like a Google search.

A lot less than you used to. For me it’s probably about 50% less. So I’m going to tools like chat, GBT, Claude and so on to search for answers, not just Google. So what does that mean? That means as a course creator AI. Tools, the language models will surface your course and people will find you and find links to you or at least discover you there on on a chat with an AI somewhere.

In addition to traditional methods like Google search, YouTube, social media, AI is gonna become a bigger and more and more important category. This is where all the opportunity is though. So when you have an AI optimization plan as a course creator, let me share some things that will help you stand out in a, in AI tools.

I’m learning this from personal experience and I’m, I found myself actually grateful and really lucky for some decisions I made over 13 years ago at the beginning of lifter LMS. Those decisions are this we have created a podcast. You’re listen to now, we’re somewhere around 500 episodes.

Each episode is on average, somewhere around 45 minutes, so I don’t do public math, but whatever, 500 times, 45 minutes, that’s a lot of minutes. All those episodes are out in the public domain where AI can crawl. Information. We also publish our podcast to YouTube. YouTube is al is also ingested by all the ais all the transcripts and all that stuff.

And that’s just our podcast. We have over a thousand pages of documentation on how to use lifter LMS. We have about a thousand blog posts and many pages on our website, informational pages. That describe what we do. We have our own social media presence in public discussions. We’ve been involved in on Reddit x YouTube comments and so on.

So because we have this large surface area of publicly available open content.

Theis know who we are. They found us like we’re not hiding. The problem with course creators is if you put all your intellectual property is basically inside the course or the membership, and the only public thing you have is a sales page and a checkout, you’re almost invisible to ai. This is why it’s important to do things like start a podcast.

Start a blog if you do a newsletter. Which I highly recommend publish the newsletter, the historical newsletter, post publicly on your site so they don’t just disappear into the email EERs make, start a YouTube channel. Get involved in conversations and help people. Don’t just be salesy and spammy, but help people in your industry, in your category.

For free. In places like Reddit and other public social media places, the AI is gonna be scraping. If you think about grok, that’s the the AI from X. So Grok obviously has optics on everything happening on X. If you’re not doing anything on x, gr is less and less likely to be aware of you.

This is all to say that Google search is not going to die. It’s gonna evolve. Google itself has its own AI tools, Gemini, which is awesome. But put, my advice is to put at least as much public content out there that you have behind the paywall so that the AI systems can discover you and help people find you when they’re looking for people, courses, resources.

Like you have. The next thing that I see in the next five years in an AI driven world is an increase in bigger issues around ethics, authenticity. And just doing the right moral thing. So what do I mean by that? One, AI today, if you look at. Video generated content or even text content.

You can’t always tell if it’s AI or not. So the line, it used to be obvious when something was ai, particularly in in video. But even videos as we call it, a deep fake, is now pretty possible. Like I know I’ve seen some AI content that I thought was real that is actually. No, not, and AI is just gonna get better and better the worst ai today is the worst AI’s ever gonna be.

It’s just gonna keep getting better and better which creates issues. So it’s okay to create a digital version of yourself. Whether that’s like a chat bot that’s trained on your knowledge base and helps people it’s okay to. Use AI to help with your writing and so on. But what’s not okay is to mislead people into, people need to know when they’re dealing with a human or not.

So I’m not this is just for informational purposes. I’m not a lawyer. Consult a lawyer. Get your own legal advice. But in your terms and conditions and your privacy policy page and everything on your website, I would encourage you to think about if you are using ai, how to incorporate that fact into your terms and conditions and your privacy policy and so on.

For example, with a privacy policy, if you are doing coaching and you’re really getting unique personal information from your clients and. You as a coach are leveraging AI to help you process and best coach those clients. If you’re sending that personal information away to another tool like chat, GBT, or wherever that’s a privacy policy issue.

So you just need to be upfront around all those things and be careful as well. Like it’s one thing to share that information to an AI tool about a coaching client with zero personally identifiable information. Versus actually like just dumping in their real name, their real email address.

They filled out this form with all this data, their company name, all this stuff, and you just push that out into chat GBT servers or whatever. You have to think about all of that. And the other thing too is AI tends to be affirming and it also can hallucinate. So sometimes we, don’t want AI to always be saying, Hey, good job.

You’re so smart, you’re doing the right thing. We sometimes we, need to do a little bit of tough love or not always be so positive. I am a very positive person. I love positivity. I like to default positivity of ai. But when it comes to education and learning and coaching, sometimes you have to give a little tough love or a little hard feedback or disagree.

With your client or your student. So think about that. And also sometimes AI will hallucinate, it will give incorrect information or straight up lie. And you need to have safeguards in place for that. Some, one way we talk about it is, we call it human in the loop, where a human will always review anything AI creates before.

It goes out. Or if you’re not gonna do that, let’s say you have an AI chat bot that’s trained on your knowledge base or whatever you wanna have a big disclaimer up front like, Hey, I am an ai, this is, I’m an AI chat bot. Sometimes my results may not be a hundred percent accurate or whatever. So just think about all that.

The authenticity, the ethics and the morals and all that stuff are really important when we’re using AI to accelerate us. We don’t want it to move, it go so fast to a point where we’re crossing ethical boundaries and not being authentic and true. Then my last thing is that AI for the course creators, it’s so much bigger than courses.

It’s about building AI augmented businesses. So as I was saying earlier, course content is somewhat becoming commodified and the value of it’s going down and down. So for an example of that is. Why would I sign up for a course about X when I can just ask AI to get the same information or even better information?

One reason is the course. There’s only one you teaching that course, and maybe they have a feel a connection to you or you have a unique style and, the people want you. Again, this is why your authenticity and personal brand really matter, but outside of courses. The winners will be building they’ll be accelerated by this AI content and research got, gets a million times easier than it is today.

That’s gonna lower the barrier to entry. Like part of me loves course creation because it had a little bit of a barrier to entry. ’cause getting on camera and building a website, a LMS website and everything. It’s not as easy as opening up a social media account and becoming an influencer.

So there’s a little bit of a barrier to entry AI’s blowing that all out of the water, even in WordPress. Keep a close eye on WordPress, the new AI stuff that’s coming into core WordPress. Basically where it’s going is you’re gonna be able to chat with your website and what that means is, think of it like chatting to chat GPT, but you’re actually chatting with your website like, Hey, add another service offering for this.

Create a new product for that. Change this sales page in this way. Replace that image with different image. So we’re moving to conversational interfaces. We’re already, there in many ways. But we haven’t really done that with our website. You know what the conversational interface for our website was in the past and is today for the most part.

It’s a developer, it’s an agency, it’s a freelancer. So what that means is it’s not that AI is going to take jobs from website builders, it’s just that will happen for people that don’t. Evolve as freelancers and developers and agencies to better serve their clients in the AI world. But you’re gonna be able to chat with your website and get stuff done just by talking to your website.

This is one of the cool things about WordPress and where the, AI map is and direction is going with that. Scale with automation. And, but don’t over automate, don’t remove the human entirely. Think bigger than just courses is where you can get into the memberships and the course cohorts and the community and the social learning and the the private coaching, the group coaching, the office hours, all of these things are becoming more and more important so that you can build a full stack AI augmented education business.

I’d recommend that if you’re behind the curve on ai, just start playing with it. It’s changing so fast. The main thing is just to start playing with it. Try to make videos with it. Try to make images with it. Use it for some research. Use it for some of your content things. Double down on niching, double down on your personal brand.

Double down on community and really obsess about human transformation and not just giving people the best information, help your target market transform into the better person that they want to become. So I want to encourage you to own your platform. Build your online education business on your own website, please do that.

That’s what WordPress is there for. That’s what lifter LMS is there for. Remember, these are open tools. You know where we’re going with ai. Let’s say you wanted to customize your LMS that’s so much easier on a platform like WordPress that you own and control that’s open source than some closed, hosted, overpriced, expensive course tool.

So build your AI augmented education business on your own website with WordPress and lifter LMS. And remember, AI lowers barriers. So it creates a lot of noise, but it also creates opportunity. So chase the high end of the market in terms of becoming an AI augmented. Education entrepreneur that’s building even better learning experiences with the help of ai.

So that’s it for this episode. Thank you for listening. Don’t forget with all this AI and technology and website building, it’s good to go outside and take a break and connect with humans in nature and we’ll catch you in the next episode. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over@lifterlms.com slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.

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