The State of AI Course Creation 2026

Four groups create most courses with AI, each with a different goal

Among people creating courses for others, course creators and coaches account for 31%, teachers and lecturers 28%, corporate learning and HR teams 24%, and training providers and consultants 16%. A further one in five people whose role is clear use the same tools to build study material for their own learning.

Each group arrives with a different goal. Corporate teams build job skills, compliance and onboarding training. Teachers build lessons for their subjects. Creators build courses to sell.

Job skills, not compliance, are what most people build with AI

Job and technical skills are the largest category at 26% of learning-related prompts, followed by academic subjects at 18% and personal development at 9%. Compliance and safety training accounts for 6%, and onboarding for under 2%.

The pattern suggests AI is being used to fill the long tail of practical, role-specific skills that rarely got a formal course before, rather than only to speed up the mandatory training every organisation already has.

Education and technology lead, but every sector is represented

K-12 education (12%) and technology (11%) are the largest sectors, followed by business and entrepreneurship (7%), higher education (6%) and healthcare (5%). Finance, construction and trades, manufacturing and the public sector each account for 2 to 3%.

The spread matters more than the ranking. The same tools are being used for a primary school science unit, a hydraulic maintenance certification and a pharmacy dermocosmetics course.

Each language is a different market

Portuguese-language prompts lean towards independent creators: course creators and coaches account for 17% of Portuguese prompts, more than twice their share in English, and courses about earning income (14%) and personal development (15%) are about twice as common as in English. English has the most corporate mix, with learning teams and training providers making up 13% of prompts.

The typical brief is 21 words long

The median first prompt is 21 words, about the length of a sentence. 44% of first prompts are under 100 characters, while 20% run past 500 characters, often because the person pasted in their own outline or content.

Most people then keep talking to the AI: 76% send more than one prompt before their course is generated, using the conversation to fill in what the first brief left out.

Nearly half of briefs leave out every key design decision

We checked each learning-related prompt for five decisions an instructional designer would ask about: the audience, their level, the length of the course, the learning outcomes and how learning will be assessed. 47% of prompts mention none of them. Only 13% mention three or more.

The audience is the detail people include most often (31%). Learning outcomes (17%) and assessment (16%), the two that most shape a course, appear in about one prompt in six.

Corporate teams and training providers write the most complete briefs

Corporate learning teams and training providers leave out every key design decision in only one brief in five, against nearly half overall. Corporate teams name the audience most often (70%), and training providers (45%) and corporate teams (44%) are the most likely to give the AI their own source material. Course creators state learning outcomes most often (44%) and are the least likely to provide source material (17%).

Most AI-built courses settle at six to nine modules

The median course has 8 modules and about 28 pages. Half of all courses fall between 6 and 9 modules, and only one in ten runs past 12.

That range is long enough to cover a topic and short enough for a learner to finish in a few sittings.

One in three courses starts from an existing document, and those courses go deeper

A third of creators begin by uploading material they already have: a policy, a slide deck, a manual or a PDF. The other two thirds type a prompt and let the AI work from general knowledge.

The difference shows up in the outline. Courses built from a document have a median of 8 modules, against 6 for prompt-only courses. Source material gives the AI specific content to organise, so it covers more ground and stays closer to how the organisation actually works.

New users generate their first course a median of five minutes after signing up

The middle half of new users produce a first course between 3 and 10 minutes after creating an account, and 40% of all new signups build a course within their first week.

Speed to a first draft is now measured in minutes. The time that remains, and where quality is won or lost, is in reviewing that draft against what learners actually need.

After the draft, people add to it far more than they cut

When creators ask the AI to change their course, the most common requests are to add new content (17%), add images (14%), add a quiz (10%) or add examples and scenarios (8%). Requests to shorten (1.5%) or simplify (2%) are rare.

12% of requests are questions rather than instructions, such as how to do something in the course or whether the AI can change a section. Editing has become a conversation.

Video is the content people add most once the draft is done

When creators edit their AI draft, 48% add a video, 32% an image and 28% a quiz. Interactive elements such as assignments (16%) and flip cards (14%) are used by a smaller but committed group.

The pattern suggests creators treat the AI draft as the structure and text, then add the media and practice that make it engaging.

45% of courses are built in a language other than English

Portuguese (15%) and Spanish (14%) together account for nearly three in ten courses, and Brazilian Portuguese alone represents 13% of everything built. French, Arabic and German follow, and 18 languages each produced at least 30 courses in the quarter.

This matters because training written in the learner's working language reduces the cost and delay of translating an English master course.

Learners pass three in four quiz attempts in the typical course

The median course has a quiz pass rate of 76%. A course at the 25th percentile passes 62% of attempts, and one at the 75th percentile passes 91%.

Both ends of that range are worth investigating. Outside mastery-based courses, a pass rate above 90% can mean questions are too easy to tell you much, while a rate well below 60% usually points to unclear content or ambiguous questions rather than weak learners.

The median course is finished by 46% of the learners who start it

Completion is the most variable number in this report. The top quarter of courses are finished by 78% of learners or more, while the bottom quarter are finished by 6% or fewer.

A gap that wide is rarely explained by content alone. Whether the course is required, whether managers follow up, and how long it takes to finish all shape the result.

Nearly a third of course building and learning happens on a phone

32% of creators generated a course on a mobile device, and 29% of learners who completed a course did so on a phone. Mobile is no longer an edge case for either side of training.

PDF leads exports, and SCORM 2004 has overtaken SCORM 1.2

Over half of users who export a course take a PDF (53%). Among those loading courses into another learning management system, SCORM 2004 (16%) is now used slightly more than the older SCORM 1.2 (14%), while LTI remains small at 5%. Users can export in more than one format, so shares add up to more than 100%.