It seems that every new course I review as a Pluralsight content reviewer, I realize I have an opinion about how to design effective courses.

It is pretty common that during a course, you need to present stuff that the learner could read about in the documentation.

In the past, it was sort of useful (although annoying, if you were already familiar) to summarize and synthesize documentation and regurgitate it for the learner.

But in this new era of ChatGPT and et al, it's not. I think it's now table-stakes that any course authored by a human includes sharing learning from lived experiences and passing on some wisdom. In fact, I don't think I'd consider buying a course anymore without that.

Why?

Because as a learner, I can do this now:

In other words, I don't need a course anymore to get pretty specific information related to my tech stack, and I can, in fact, get pretty tailored suggestions.

However, what I can't do is this:

ChatGPT has never migrated a site in production in Next.js from Pages router to App router. And it can't help me do it either. It can only tell me things to know, it cannot yet transfer direct experience and wisdom to me.

However, you as a human and SME and someone with the lived experience of migrating a Next.js project can – and that is your responsibility now as a human educator.

In my latest course on testing .NET MAUI applications, I received feedback from the reviewer that "it might be nice to show how you resolved the failure" (that I was presenting).

I originally edited out the root cause analysis to stay under the course time limit – but I brought back 45 seconds worth of content because they were right. It's worth it to spend the extra time explaining how I fixed the problem in real life, because it's wisdom I gained that I should pass on.

I'll be thinking about this even more for whatever courses come next 😄

Have a lovely day,
Kamran