Building My First Online Course with AI

Oct 30, 2026 · @JONGWOO HAN

Simple online courses can be built with AI’s help. But AI supplies only the skeleton. The substance of a course has to come from the life you have actually lived. Start small, and the frame of your first course can stand within a month.

1. Deciding What to Teach

Write down what you know first

Before opening any AI tool, I take out a sheet of paper. I list the work I’ve done for years, the questions people keep asking me, and the things I learned only after a lot of trial and error. I don’t organize anything. I just let it pour out.

I followed this order while writing my four books. I got my own knowledge onto the page first, and only then did I call in AI. If the order is reversed, only what AI already knows remains, and my own voice disappears. A course works the same way.

Narrow it to one sentence

Write one sentence: who you are teaching, what you are teaching, and how far you will take them. For example: “I teach people in their 60s who are new to smartphones how to video-call their family within 30 minutes.” If you can’t write that sentence, the topic is still too wide.

Narrow topics tend to sell better. The viewer sees the title and knows at once, “This is for me.”

2. Designing with AI

Turn your notes into a structure

Paste your notes and your one-sentence goal into ChatGPT or Claude. Then ask: “Based on these notes, build a course outline of five to seven lessons. For each lesson, give me a learning goal and three key points.”

AI is good at arranging my notes in an orderly way. I never use the outline as it comes. I reorder it, fill in what’s missing, and cut what isn’t needed. Usually half survives and half gets rewritten.

Keep each lesson short

Five to ten minutes per lesson is enough. Viewers rarely finish long ones. Teach only one thing per lesson.

At the end of each lesson, give the viewer one small task to try. A course people only watch leaves less behind than a course people follow along with.

What I don’t hand to AI

There are three things I keep for myself. The first is real examples. What I lived through, I must write myself. The second is fact-checking. AI states wrong things with confidence. The third is voice. Even when AI drafts the script, I read it aloud and rewrite it in my own way of speaking.

3. Making It and Putting It Online

Recording and captions

You don’t need expensive equipment. Put your smartphone on a stand, sit in a quiet room, and face a window for natural light. Sound matters more than picture quality. Even a simple earphone microphone makes your voice noticeably clearer.

Print the script in large type and set it beside the camera. Generate captions automatically and fix only the wrong words. For viewers in midlife and beyond, captions help a great deal.

Where to publish

Start somewhere simple. Course marketplaces like Udemy already have visitors, so discovery is easier. Platforms like Teachable or Gumroad let you keep your students’ email addresses and often offer better terms, but you have to bring the audience yourself. Fees and conditions change often, so check each site before you upload.

4. Cautions and the First Step

Verification and privacy

Check every number, legal point, medical statement, and financial claim in your course against official sources. If you can’t verify something, leave it out. When you use student stories, remove names and personal details. Never type your national ID number or bank account numbers into an AI tool.

Meet your first students early

Showing the course to ten people you know beats spending months polishing it. Their questions become the material for your next lesson. [Add one or two sentences here about your own experience teaching or giving talks.]

Start small, watch the response, and keep refining. It worked when I wrote my books, and it works for courses too.

Han Jong-woo’s 3 Key Tips

1. Write your own story first, then call AI. Your pouring-out notes become the heart of the course.
2. Narrow it to one sentence, and cut lessons to 5–10 minutes. The narrower and shorter it is, the more people finish it.
3. Do the examples and the verification yourself. AI builds the frame; your experience earns the trust.

Many people say they have nothing to teach. If you have lived seventy years, you already do. This week, open a notebook and start by writing down what you know.