Using AI to make learning personal and increase your online course sales

Online courses are more than just video lectures and quizzes; they're about creating a learning experience that resonates with each student. This is where AI steps in, offering a unique opportunity to tailor education to individual learning styles. Incorporating AI into your courses allows you to create a personalized learning environment that adapts to each student's needs. This personal touch doesn't just improve the learning experience; it also makes your courses more attractive and can increase sales. Let's explore how AI can make online courses more personal and commercially successful.

Before incorporating AI into our course and adding it as a unique selling point, we must create and train a chatbot with knowledge of our course and can assist our students with their questions. To do this, we'll create a new chatbot in SiteSpeakAI.

Creating your chatbot

1. Click on the chatbot drop-down in the menu bar
2. Select the Create Chatbot option
3. Give your chatbot a name and make sure the Customer Support type is selected.

You're now ready to train your chatbot based on your YouTube content. Ensure you have a list of all the video URLs you would like to use to train your course bot.

Training your chatbot

For this example, we'll use the excellent free Notion fundamentals course created by Thomas Frank.

1. Select the YouTube option
2. Enter the first YouTube URL and click the Get Transcript button.
3. Once the transcript has been generated, add it.
4. You can now add more sources until you've added all your links by repeating steps 1 to 3.

Once your course bot has been trained, you can update the system prompt to give instructions on using its knowledge and responding to your students. The system prompt is also a great place to include a link to your website or other courses to guide your students to where they can find more information.

Setting instructions and the model to use for your chatbot

Select the Settings option from the sidebar to set specific instructions for your bot.

If you're on a plan that allows you to change the GPT model, you can switch to the GPT-4 model here, which is better than the GPT-3.5 model. But don't worry if you're not; GPT-3.5 is still more than capable of helping your students.

To set the system prompt, select the Prompts tab, and then enter a prompt that instructs your chatbot in the Base Prompt input. For the example, we'll use this prompt:

You are a kind and friendly expert in Notion. You are able to answer questions based on the Notion course content you have been trained on. When applicable, refer the visitor to the author of the course, Thomas Frank's website here: https://thomasjfrank.com where they can find more information.

You're now ready to customize the look of the chatbot to match your brand and course.

Head to the Appearance section to update the welcome message, theme, colors, and icons.

Your chatbot is now ready to be tested to see if it can answer some questions your students might have about the content of your course.

To quickly test your chatbot, click the Test Chatbot option in the sidebar.

You can now ask your chatbot questions about the course and related information as your students would.

If there are any answers you are not happy with, you can update those using the Inbox. Select the Not correct? Update this answer option underneath the response you'd like to improve, then update the chatbot's response to a more fitting answer. Your chatbot will then use this information when replying to similar questions.

Checking and updating your chatbot's responses is a crucial and ongoing step to ensure your course bot constantly improves and can respond to any question.

Once you're happy with your bot and would like to share it with your students or embed it on your course website, select the Install Chatbot option from the sidebar. You can copy the share URL or a code snippet to embed in your site.

Your students can now use your chatbot to get more personalized answers to their questions from your course content. You should also continue to check in on your chatbot's progress via the Inbox to see where you can guide students to other relevant information and courses you might want to offer them.

To add a unique selling point to your course, you can include that students who purchase it also get exclusive access to your AI chatbot, which will improve their learning.

Here is a video tutorial of setting up the bot as described if this is more your thing.

Are you already using an AI chatbot to improve your online courses? I'd love to hear. 😀