Can agentic AI build your entire online course?

I asked the "general AI agent" Manus to design and create an online course. There were some glitches, but the result shows what advanced AI could be capable of in the very near future

Image: Midjourney

I almost didn’t post this piece. I had a positive experience working with the agentic AI Manus a few days ago to create an online course, and that’s what prompted the article. However, since then I’ve failed to replicate this success. As well as being severely throttled — no doubt due to a massive surge of interest from people wanting to try it — Manus has been very inconsistent in what it’s been able to produce. Frustratingly so! However, my experience below — flawed as it was — does provide a glimpse of what general AI agents are likely to be capable of in the very near future. And for this, I thought it worth publishing.

If you read my post from a few days ago you’ll know that I’ve been experimenting with Manus — the new general AI agent from Chinese company Monica. Having asked it to simulate a research study (along with a bunch of simulated students) I thought I’d scale things back a bit and set it the allegedly easier goal of designing, developing, and deploying, an online course.

Of course, people have been using generative AI to build courses for the past couple of years — me included. But what agentic AI platforms like Manus can do, which hasn’t been possible before, is to take on the whole workflow from ideation and conception to implementation — all while while making their own decisions.

And this is a potential game changer for how online educational content is developed and deployed.

It was, I must confess, not a completely smooth process working with Manus — as I explain below. But I was impressed enough with the final course that it’s one I’ll be recommending that people actually use!

A short course on navigating advanced technology transitions

Before I get to describing the process, I wanted to provide the opportunity to check out the resulting course itself:

Click to access the course

(The course is also available here: https://fvture.net/courses/tech-transitions/)

This is a short introductory course on navigating advanced technology transitions. It’s the result of just a few minutes of Manus’ time — along with several hours of mine (I’m a little slower than an AI).

Close to 100% of the ideation, concept, design, flow, and content, is based on autonomous decisions that Manus made. I had to step in at the end with some final design tweaks and debugging. But this was largely cosmetic.

Have a play with it, and let me know what you think.

Creating the course

To test out Manus I wanted a course that was not too long, and that covered key ideas related to navigating advanced technology transitions — an area that’s desperately in need of some good online learning material.

The only request I gave Manus was:

I would like you to research, develop and create the web pages for an introductory online course focused on the economic, societal and governance challenges of navigating advanced technology transitions at a time when transformative emerging technologies are upending how we think about building a better future. The course should all be web browser based and completed using a keyboard and mouse/tracker pad/touch screen only. It should be divided across multiple modules, with each module having clear learning objectives and assignments designed to enhance and test learning. Where modules are split across multiple web pages, please ensure that all the relevant content is included in web pages and that all links between pages work. Where you provide additional tools and resources, ensure that these are fully developed. The whole course should take 1 - 3 hours to complete, and should contain all the necessary learning material.¹

From this point, the AI agent decided itself how it would approach the task, and how it would execute each step — including deploying, testing, and debugging the course.

This all went impressively well … until Manus’ context window became too long, and I ran out of user credits!

The good news was that, by this point, Manus had finished constructing the course’s content, structure, and associated web pages, and was in the process of testing it when it hit a wall. As a result, I was able to go into the files it had already created,² copy the code, and continue the process on my own computer.

By running the Manus-created web pages locally and using ChatGPT to help debug the odd glitch and refine the formatting and functionality, I was able to get the completed course up and running — the online version is what’s linked to above.

The final concept, design, structure, content, and functionality, all comes from Manus. All I did was debug, make a couple of stylistic changes, add a few links to the resource list, and check the course thoroughly for accuracy.

How did Manus do?

I chose the topic of navigating advanced technology transitions in part because it’s an area I know well — and so I could assess just how well Manus did. But it’s also a topic where there’s a lack of good learning/educational material.³

Despite running out of time while checking the draft web pages, Manus delivered in spades. For anyone looking for a short online course on navigating advanced technology transitions, this fits the bill.

It’s comprehensive, accurate, clear, and designed to convey and test understanding effectively.

Plus, you get a certificate of completion if you successfully finish all the assignments — Manus’ idea, not mine.

In fact the course is so good that I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a basic introduction to navigating advanced technology transitions.

What’s particularly interesting is that this is not the course I would have created if it was just me doing the work — it’s better.

I would have been more academic, linked to more research papers, included more esoteric stuff that probably isn’t of practical use to most people, and required more intellectual heavy lifting of people taking the course.

But then the course would not have been fit for the audience that I think is most likely to benefit from it.

Instead, this is a course that is ideal for people who are looking for useable information and insights that they can assimilate in 1 - 3 hours, and who don’t have the time or inclination to jump through unnecessary academic hoops.

Of course it’s not perfect. Seasoned online course designers will no doubt question the volume of text-based material, the simplicity of the assignments, and the lack of links to sources. But if you’re of the mind that we shouldn’t be making the perfect the enemy of the good in crafting learning environments, it’s pretty good.

And remember, it only took a few minutes for Manus to create!

Admittedly it then took me several hours to add the final polish and make sure everything was accurate and functional. But even from this perspective, comparing a few hours working with Manus and ChatGPT to the weeks and even months this might have taken a team of humans, this is pretty impressive.

Hold on to your hats educators, agentic AI is coming your way!

Part of the reason for running this experiment with Manus was to get a better sense of how disruptive agentic AIs like this could be within learning and education.

Even with Manus’ current limitations, my strong sense is that this is yet another turning point for education, and one that educators ignore at their peril.

If Manus is anything to go by, it will soon be possible to ask agentic AIs to whip up online courses in a matter of minutes that are as good as, if not better than, those that have taken teams of humans substantial time and money to create.

More than this, the agentic AIs that will be developing these course are not likely to be proprietary platforms or institutional tools. Rather, like Manus, they will be off-the-shelf general purpose AI apps that are potentially accessible by anyone who has a desire to create an online course.

This is likely to deeply disrupt the market for online educational content.

It it’s also likely to massively expand the type of educational content that’s available online.

With current market-based education models, there’s a tendency for the market to dictate what’s offered to learners. Why create courses on topics that aren’t mainstream when there’s more money to be made on the staples?

But if agentic AI makes online learning tools vastly cheaper to produce than those developed by companies and universities, there are fewer reasons not to create courses on topics that are important but not necessarily money makers — navigating advanced technology transitions being one of these.

This, to me, is aa very exciting prospect. It means that, for people like myself who are focused on making knowledge and understanding as accessible and as useful as possible, we could be heading toward a revolution in how knowledge and training flow through society.

But if I had a financial stake in educational models where knowledge is treated as a commodity to be bought and sold, I’d be worried.

Of course, we’re still in the early days of general AI agents. But all the indications are that we’re just at the beginning of this particular AI technology’s exponential rise.

And despite the potential disruptions and the glitches, I can’t wait to see where it takes us.

1. This is probably a longer prompt than was necessary — in part because I’d learned from experience that it was worth being specific about the course content and functionality. I also wanted an example of a short online course that could potentially be completed by an AI — hence the instructions about mouse/keyboard control. But that’s a post for another day.

2. Manus executes its tasks by spinning up a virtual machine where it can write and execute code and browse the web. Fortunately, even after my credits had run out, I still had access to the virtual machine and so could cut and paste the code for the online course website.

3. I did have an ulterior motive for this exercise I must confess. I wanted to see how well Manus could navigate and complete an online course autonomously. But for this, I needed a course I could test it on. Now I have the course, it’s on to part 2 of the plan …