#227: The Psychology of Learning that AI Misses: Creating a Digital Course that Works

Introduction

Everywhere we turn there is AI. And we are told over and over just to pop some great prompts into AI and it will do all of the heavy lifting for us, including churning out a full blown course in just seconds. And in a time when everything seems to be going toward AI gung ho, it’s tempting to rely on artificial intelligence to do that heavy lifting when creating an online course so that we can make dinner, run errands, relax with a great book, and enjoy all that life has to offer. 

But can AI truly capture the nuances of human learning?

I’ll go ahead and let you in on the answer. No. AI cannot capture all of the nuances and the science behind learning that is needed for a course that delivers results for our students. It can do a lot, but I’m going to draw attention to three elements that AI can’t replicate and because AI is here to stay at the end of the episode in our Sixty-Second Solution I’m going to give you a few things to look out for to ensure you are creating an ethical course even if you do use AI to help with some of the content.

Why Human-Centered Design Matters

As someone who is typically quick to adopt tech and new approaches, I always do so with skepticism and with AI I’ve been very slow and exceptionally skeptical as an academic to incorporate AI into my life and business. 

I’m a big fan of being real, being human, and coming up with and sharing my own ideas. It probably comes from years of being required to think outside the box, generate unique and new ideas, and being constantly aware of the risks of plagiarism. 

But I do recognize that AI is likely here to stay and many course creators are using it. I see ads all the time talking about putting in specific prompts and getting out a course that is ready to record in just minutes. But we have to remember a few things.

AI can generate content, create visuals, and even automate certain aspects of course delivery, but it lacks the human touch that we need, and crave, for building an effective and engaging learning experience for our students.

Think about it this way. How many times have you put something into your favorite AI tool and gotten back the word, “delve”? How many emails have you opened and instantly realized that someone put a topic into an AI generator and asked for an email about that topic and then they copied/pasted and hit send. I can see it in my student’s work on tests when they put an essay prompt into AI and then give me the AI response. It lacks authenticity, it lacks a normal speech and writing pattern, and it just feels disconnected…almost like the disconnection you and your stomach feel when going down a rollercoaster. It is uncomfortable. Intriguing, but uncomfortable. And this makes it hard to connect to. The last thing we want is to make it hard for our digital course students to find our course unengaging or cringe worthy because it is so obviously AI generated.

AI also lacks the active learning in delivery that we know, based on science, is necessary for the best outcomes. We can’t just sit in a chair, listen, and experience success. We have to do. It is why I ask you to take action at the end of every episode of this podcast. It is why I try to give you examples that resonate and that you can apply to your life. It isn’t just about delivering bullet points, but making that come alive and make sense.

The truth is that AI doesn’t let us, as course creators, create a personal connection with our students. It takes the “human” out of it and that can leave our students feeling like they are out in the cold snow without boots, mittens, and a coat. And I don’t know about you, but if I’m cold, I’m cranky, frustrated, and want to just go inside despite the beauty of the snow. Put another way, if our students are frustrated with the lack of connection a course brings, they will want to give up and walk away from our course.

So how do we marry AI and being human so that we create a course that works for our students and helps them meet the course objectives? Focus on three elements that AI can’t do, but we can as course creators.

Three Key Elements AI Can’t Replicate

Element 1: The Power of Real-World Examples

First up, is to focus on the power of real-world examples. AI can generate facts and figures, but have you noticed that when you ask it to provide authentic, relatable examples they are either canned responses that everyone would recognize OR they make no sense because they don’t even apply. So, yes it can provide examples, but they feel off kilter. 

One of your super powers as a course creator is the stories you can tell to make the ideas and key points come alive. As humans, we connect better and remember better what is relatable. Give us a chart of numbers and we will have to labor over remembering them. Give us a good story that applies to the concepts and it becomes so much easier to remember and ultimately implement.

Just stating the facts, the objectives, the key elements we outlined when mapping out our courses or when we asked AI to do that will not be enough. For example, if you have a course on growth mindset for teens, instead of just defining what growth mindset is and the areas that teens are likely to find this difficult, give an example. Tony, a 17-year-old, was thinking about colleges and realized that his grades and extracurricular activities were not going to get him into his dream school. He had been slacking off and felt like maybe he should just aim lower because it was going to be an uphill battle in his junior year to make any big changes. His school counselor noticed that Tony was going to completely shift his goals and suggested that he, instead, look at how he could make  change and then use that positive shift to share with his dream colleges the importance of that mindset approach. 

By telling a story, now your course student can see how helping their teen shift mindset might work, how it could apply to their situation. It becomes more than a definition and a pie in the sky wish. It is concrete. 

Those stories, the analogies like I gave at the beginning of this episode comparing a clearly AI-generated experience to the uncomfortable feeling of being disconnected to your stomach on the roller coaster, the real-world examples make it easier to connect with the information. 

Remember that inside our brain lies a web of experiences, much like a spiderweb where each item is connected to other items. When we tell stories it is easier for the new information to be connected to things that we already have in our web of experiences. This makes it stronger and much more likely to stick around. Just like things that come in contact with a spider web get stuck, so does the new information we are presenting to our students in each module and lesson.

So first up was to make sure that we are adding in relatable examples. This is something that AI just does not excel at.

Element 2: The Importance of Active Learning

Second, an element that AI can’t give us, that we absolutely need to add to our digital courses to boost student retention and success are active learning opportunities.

Yes, AI can create quizzes and multiple-choice questions, but it struggles to design truly engaging and effective learning activities. Don’t get me wrong, there is a place for quizzes and multiple-choice questions to check for understanding and even to give out badges of achievement, but that isn’t the same as hands-on practice.

Research has shown us that we do our best learning when we are actively involving ourselves with the information. In the case of a course that means going beyond listening to some videos and taking notes. For a course on photography it might mean asking our students to pick up their camera and changing the camera from automatic mode to manual mode, changing the f stop, and zooming in or out with the lens. This brings the instructions and process to life for the student.

For a course in accounting in your business it might mean opening the tracking spreadsheet that was provided and asking students to begin filling out the different elements from expenses to income to Stripe fees. 

AI isn’t great at helping us to come up with a detailed hands-on approach to learning, even when in a digital space.

Part of this active learning approach that we can add into our courses also requires that we add in a layer of empathy. Let’s face it. The first time we change the camera from automatic to manual mode is going to result in some pretty wonky pictures. They will not be our best attempts and we might be tempted to go back to auto mode. 

The first time we start looking carefully at our expenses and realize just how much we are spending on domain names that we aren’t using and haven’t redirected to our main site is a little embarrassing to say the least.

We need to show up for our students in those moments and offset the shock and clumsiness with stories of how we went through the same thing and came out stronger. We can empathize that it shouldn’t feel this hard if it was the right way to do things. This kind of human empathy helps our students to feel seen and heard, and even more importantly helps them to develop the resilience to keep trying until they master the skill or decide which domain names are on the chopping block when renewal comes around.

By creating active learning opportunities and adding in that human empathy, we are creating a safe place for our students to learn the material they’ve come to learn in our course as well as put into action what we are teaching. This is the psychology of learning that AI misses. This is a big part of why AI generated digital courses will always have a lower retention, completion, and success rate than a human created, imperfect course will have.

Element 3: The Value of Personalized Support

And that brings me to the third human element that we absolutely can’t get from AI and that is support. Once again, you might be thinking but chatbots and FAQs can be powerful, and they can. I’ve talked about one of my favorite chatbots, Dottie, which is part of the Social Curator platform, but Dottie can’t hold my hand and give me personalized feedback that addresses the little nooks and crannies of my business or my course.

AI cannot replicate that personalized feedback.

As digital course creators, we have to constantly be looking for ways to build trust and foster the relationship with our students. When we do this, they don’t sit behind their computer screen unnecessarily worrying about how to implement Module 6, Lesson 5 of our course. They know to show up to our support call, our office hours, the Facebook or Circle group and ask the question. They don’t waste days or weeks stuck. 

Now you might be thinking about all of the times you’ve signed up for a course and not had any level of support and it went ok. We have all had those experiences, but we’ve also had more experiences that ended up with us getting lost, misunderstanding a key lesson, or just never opening the course because it felt too daunting. 

There is an added benefit of us showing up to support our students and that is we can adapt and adjust our course faster when new concepts pop up, the industry shifts, or we figure out that the exact same issue comes up for nearly every single student. If we weren’t linked to our student’s learning journey, this change process would be much slower. And it is definitely something that AI can’t do for us because AI doesn’t know our students, read our emails, see the community group posts that are worried, frustrated, or celebrating.

The Live Q&A sessions, the one-on-one or one-to-group coaching calls, and the feedback that we can give our students isn’t something we can ask AI to do and then walk away while AI autopilots our course.

Our digital course, if we want it to work and follow the principles of learning, has to include us as the course creator.

Action Item

This week, I’d like you to take some time to reflect on your course content and identify areas where you can incorporate more human-centered elements. The things that AI can’t give us. We’ve talked about several today, but there are plenty more that impact the learning process of our students. 

You don’t have to completely re-write your course, but you can choose to record an extra example, add in a way to gather this month where your course students can ask questions, and you can always add in a new resource that generates active learning and engagement.

The key is to take action.

Sixty-Second Solution

One common challenge when trying to create a digital course is getting started and so we hop over to an AI tool like ChatGPT, Gemini, or a customGPT you’ve created and put in our course topic and ask it to write us a course with 5 modules and 3 lessons per module.

It churns for a few seconds, says sure and pops out an entire course. What used to take weeks, months, or years is now done in seconds. Or is it?

If you are going to use AI in your course creation process, be sure to take a few steps to stay on the right side of ethical and moral boundaries. 

One of the best ways to make sure that you are always sharing your work and not others’ work inside your course. And if you share someone else’s work, like in a curated course, that you are giving them appropriate credit and linking back to them. When AI spits out the course content, it is hard to tell if they have taken someone else’s model and given it to you. One way to use AI, but ensure that the work is yours is to tell AI to take these key module objectives and these key points for each module and build it into x number of lessons. When you are the one providing the information and asking AI to help you organize it, the information is much more likely to be your own intellectual property rather than someone else’s IP.  

As you are preparing your course using what AI has given you, be sure that you are fact checking, making sure that everything is accurate and makes sense. Honestly, AI gives some pretty strange examples that don’t apply to what we’ve been talking about. 

The key, if you are using AI, is to treat your course content to the same scrutiny a research project would undergo. Make sure that everything you claim to be your own IP actually is your IP. Make sure to give credit where credit is due, and be sure that the content is unbiased and respectful of diverse perspectives.

Where to Go Next?

While AI can be a valuable tool in the course creation process, we have to remember the importance of the human element. By focusing on creating authentic learning experiences, providing personalized support, and prioritizing ethical considerations, we can create truly impactful and transformative courses that go beyond the limitations of AI.

When thinking about all that AI can do for your course, remember that digital courses are rarely a passive revenue stream, even if you use AI to write your content for you. We still need to be involved in the learning experience of our students, provide personalized support, and create active learning opportunities if we are truly committed to being ethical and delivering on the promise of our course.

And speaking of providing support for our students, if you missed episode 225, The Power of Live Q&A Sessions, you’ll want to check that one out because we talk about the power of connection and how to run live Q&A sessions even if you have a very small group of students and alumni.

And if me bringing up how many students you have and how many alumni have gone through your course makes you squirm a little because list growth is currently the bane of your existence, check out Episode 211 with guest Tracy Beavers where we talk about how to build your email list every day without relying on paid ads.

As always, thank you so much for listening in. If you found this episode helpful, please share with your entrepreneur friends and colleagues who are building a digital course in their business and be sure to subscribe to the Digital Course Creator Podcast.

Until next time, happy creating!