The Claude Playbook Smart Course Creators Are Already Running

In this episode, Chris Badgett provides a thorough guide on how contemporary course designers are use Claude to greatly expedite and enhance the process of creating and marketing online courses.He says he switched to Claude because it is better at handling long-form content, retains more context, and generates more dependable, less “hallucinated” outputs all of which are particularly helpful when working on big projects like entire books, courses, or sales pages.

In addition to the chat interface, he breaks down the larger Claude ecosystem, which includes tools like Projects for work organization, Claude Design for making slides, visuals, and even interactive lessons, and Cowork/agents that can connect with tools like Google Drive, email, or analytics to automate workflows and produce insights. He emphasizes useful applications for course designers, such converting student support letters into new lesson ideas, translating courses for international audiences, developing sales pages and email sequences, summarizing and making FAQs, and building quizzes from lesson content.

Additionally, he places a strong emphasis on advanced use cases, such as evaluating business data (such as student behavior or course performance) and enhancing coaching through knowledge structuring, gap identification, and learning path customization. Despite all of this power, his main point is that AI should be used to enhance human expertise rather than replace it: in order to create high-caliber, influential courses, creators should give the initial guidance, let AI handle the majority of execution, and then refine the output with their own voice, experience, and insight.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program. I’m your guide, Chris Badget. I’m the co-founder of lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. State of the end, I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMS Cast. This is a solo episode. Today we’re gonna dive into using Claude, the artificial intelligence tool, and why smart course creators are al already running some smart playbooks using Claude. I, myself personally, switched my primary use of AI from chat GBT to Claude.

I’ve been blown away with the results, and I want to give you all the things I’m seeing across my work, my view on the industry, what I see team members doing with Claude what I see Lifter, LMS and other course creators and education entrepreneurs doing with Claude. But first, the reason why I switched is I just saw.

So many people who are developers. I have a lot of engineering friends. I saw them primarily using Claude and not using chat, GBT. There was a lot of, particularly among developers praise for Claude Code. And we’ll talk about the different types of Claude in a little bit. I still use chat, GBTI haven’t fully abandoned it, but I’m definitely all in on Claude.

And if you’re listening to this episode, you’re probably a forward thinker, early adopter of technology if you’re using chat GPT and haven’t tried Claude yet. I’m gonna give you some unique insights today into how they’re different and the suite of tools that Claude has that you may not know about that are super relevant to course creators.

So this is gonna be a tactical playbook with ideas and action items that you can take away if you use the full anthropic suite of tools. Anthropic is the company behind Claude, and there’s a lot of different things that Claude can do, which we’re gonna get into in a little bit. So the main reasons why Claude is really a daily driver for me over chat Chi PT these days, is I find that it works better.

For long content. It could be a long sales page, it could be a giant course project or book project or sales page project that I’m working on. And Claude has seems to have a better ability to just hold context for larger amounts of information and memories that needs to have. Claude projects are awesome.

So that you can organize and categorize better different things that you would be using. The Claude tool for, I believe Chat, GPT has folders. I just find that Claude’s Projects system works a lot better. I’ve also found that Claude Hallucinates a lot less than chat GBT according to Anthropic.

Claude is trained to flag what it doesn’t know, so you’re less likely to get. Inaccurate information that is hallucinating. I already mentioned it, but the develop, all the developers I talk to prefer Claude over chat, GBT. And then the pace of innovation at Claude, particularly recently in the past 60 or 90 days is like nothing I’ve ever seen.

It’s almost like every day I wake up, I see something new on YouTube or on social media. About some new capability or tool that Claude has added. And I’m really impressed ’cause even though they’re moving fast and shipping a lot, everything that I’m seeing is really relevant to education entrepreneurs well thought out and just makes sense.

And in my experience using it, I’m super happy with it, despite the fact that it is changing so much, I’m still able to keep up with it. And that’s the goal. Of this episode is to help you keep up. Anybody I talk to, even if they’re on the bleeding edge of using AI tools, they all, everybody feels like they’re falling behind.

So first of all, if you’re listening to this episode, I guarantee you’re not at the back of the pack. You’re not falling behind a continual investment and learning and keeping up with artificial intelligence, I find is very important. I’m not one of these people who thinks that AI is gonna do absolutely everything and everything’s gonna be replaced.

I’m just more optimizing pur purposely to augment my capabilities and my strengths and help cover my weaknesses by using Claude. And we’re gonna make this super relevant to you today as a course creator. So the first thing that’s important to go over is the clo, the Claude Product family in Plain Eng, English.

’cause this can get confusing often find that when people start using a tool, they stay with it and they don’t necessarily notice the other developments that’s going on around it. So there’s four levels to Claude. The first level of Claude is claude.ai. Which is just like the chat GBT chat interface.

You’re basically have the thread going and you’re chat chatting via Claude through their large language model. And that’s very effective and it can do a lot of different things. But that’s really level one. Claude Cowork is a different level, so that’s an Ag Agentic desktop app built around deliverables, not prompts.

So if you haven’t done it yet first use claude.ai, create an account. But if you haven’t done, if you haven’t done that, do that first, then go get the Claude Desktop app, and that allows you to get into cowork as well as regular chat. And then the third level is called Claw code, which is like a terminal grade for developers who are.

Creating code and coding with ai. And the thing is, I’m not a developer, but my business partner recently got me set up on cloud code with an agent that we’re custom building and taught me the basics of using the terminal and the command line. And this is where it really stuck for me, the whole concept of vibe coding and how.

Even if I’m not a developer, I can do this stuff. I don’t have intention to like ship lifter LMS product features or anything like that without the talented development team at Lifter LMS being involved in really leading the the code level of the software. But I do find that working in cloud code, I get the and, our custom agent that we’ve developed.

I get some incredible output that is way far and beyond just working with the regular chat interface. As an example, Claude also released Claude Design, which is part of the desktop app, and that is pretty awesome. It is also inside cloud.ai where you can design prototypes, slides, social assets.

Interactive prototypes, even entire websites. And even one of my favorite for course creators is inter interactive content that you can put into your lessons. I’m playing around with club design and it is blowing my mind. If you’ve been in our space for a while, you’re probably familiar with Canva as a graphic design tool that kind of made.

What power users of tools like Adobe’s Photoshop were doing made it accessible to the average person like myself, who’s not a trained designer. This is like that feeling again where you know, you can create great designs in cloud design even faster than what’s possible with Canva as an example, and then.

The final thing is agents. So agents can operate within all four of these layers. And like I mentioned, we’ve been developing a custom agent at Lifter LMS and what makes agents different than, let’s say just working through a chat interface is. One, they can have a lot of memory and additional context and things like certain skills that they’re trained on or, and processes to follow that are way more in that is way more advanced and outcome focused than a call and response through a chat interface.

The first thing I just want to get into is what you as a course creator can do with Claude today to get started faster and to basically accelerate what you can do in a given day. The first is just quiz creation at scale. So if you’re creating a video lesson. The cool thing is a tool like Claude can read the summary like in a second and then help come up with knowledge, check multiple choice questions and things like that.

So quiz generation can really speed up rapidly and it doesn’t mean that you should never like review the quiz questions and put your own human touch on things. But if you find the creation of quizzes to be tedious, you can use Claude to really speed that up. You might also have different content that’s repeatable, that you could build a process around and use Claude for like lesson summaries.

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So let’s say your lessons are really long. They’re one to two hours a piece of video content. You may have the transcript below. A video, which I definitely recommend in a lesson for accessibility. But you can also use Claude to generate a lesson summary, a lesson objective an FAQ library on, the lesson or quiz level as well.

I find sales page generation as a really great place to use Claude, particularly if you’re not a copywriter or a sales professional. One of the great tips for AI is to give the AI an example of what you think is a great looking sales page, and then that, allows the AI to very quickly map what your course is all about to that kind of sales page structure, which you of course can modify and make your own course descriptions and email se sequences.

These are other just great places to use Claude. Translation and localization for international students is a great place to use Claude to really free up your time. I see this a lot in French Canadas as an example where there’ll be an LMS has to be in both French and English, and there’s different ways to do a dual language LMS but.

One of the things you can do is if you have a quiz and there’s a, the English version and then the French version you can do all that translation really fast with Claude. Same with things like lesson transcripts. Let’s say you have in a lesson, a French video and an English video, and you want to crank out those French and English transcripts.

You can do that. Really fast, which is great for accessibility of course as well. And the cool thing too when you think about Claude is you can use the projects to organize what you’re doing. So you could ha you start developing processes around, let’s say creating a sales page for a course. You could have a sales page project, you could have a quizzes project, or.

Maybe you want to use projects where each course has its own project, and that way all the context is related within there. So those are just some pro tips on getting going with Claude. But there’s also an easy way to get started. We’ve actually already solved this for you with chat GPT some time ago.

We have a free course for this. That already exists and it’s, here’s the trick. It has all the prompts and everything in it. You just need to use claw.ai instead of chat GBT to create an entire course from start to finish. So if you go to the Lifter LMS Academy, that’s at academy lifter lms.com, and you find a course called How to Create an Online Course with Chat, GBT.

Take that course and then just use the prompt templates that are in the course. You just copy and paste them over to Claude. Just copy and paste ’em over to Claude instead of chat GPT, and you can use the, same, the exact same flow. The other cool thing about that course is it shows you how to not delegate too much to the AI and not get your leverage, your own unique special.

Experiences and skills. I call it a human knowledge dump. And that’s a great way to add, that’s a great thing to add to as a permanent file in your Claude setup so you don’t have to paste it into every thread. And, because Claude has a longer context window, it’s called, it just means Claude can hold.

More information at one time. You can do huge knowledge dumps and it all fits inside of the context window, which just means that Claude is gonna be more efficient and better to handle large volumes of kind of reference material that you put into an area in Claude while you’re making your online course.

So Claude also has this concept called artifacts that you can use as your lesson canvas. Chat. GBT also has a concept called Canvas that you can work on, but basically it’s side by side editing in real time. So you’re chatting with Claude and on the other side you’re seeing the lesson come together and as you make edits and revisions or add more information.

It’s a more iterative process, which people really like the way that Claude does that. So take the free course on the LiFi MS Academy and just swap in Claude for chat, GPT and you’ll, and use the prompts that exist there and you’re gonna love what you create. And you’re basically getting a ton of instructional design.

Context added in, you’re getting website building LMS website building context added in. So that course is, can really supercharge your output while also still leveraging the best parts of your knowledge, skills, and life experience into the training. So the next thing I wanna talk about is Claude design.

So this is for creating visuals. Even interactive lessons. So we all know you can use a tool like chat, GBT or any kind of AI to create a picture real quick, but cloud design is more higher level than just creating one picture. You can create much more complex projects. So things like course covers, slides.

Social media assets even an articulate storyline replacement that nobody saw coming, you can do with club design. So what are some obvious places that you need visual help as a course creator or a WordPress LMS website builder? We’ve got the featured images for courses and memberships featured images for blog posts and other content outside of your courses.

We’ve got lesson graphics. Could be diagrams, could be info graphics. We have sales page banners. There’s all kinds of things we could do. We could do slide decks. You could export to PowerPoint, PDF, Canva or even HTML. Somebody showed me recently how to do a presentation that I developed in Claude.

But export it as A-H-T-M-L file and then it actually works like a slideshow presenter. So I just jumped in my Zoom webinar that I was doing, and I had this HTML file that included my slideshow presentation that I co-created with Claude. It was amazingly fast and efficient. And the cool thing about claw design is you can put in a bunch of context before you get started on stuff like.

Your design system. So what is a design system? If you don’t know? A design system is everything from your brand guide, maybe your logo, variations of your logo. Your fonts, your typographies, your colors all that stuff that creates a unique brand. Then a design system. Maybe you have certain ways of doing different com components, like a testimonial tends to look like this.

Our headlines call to action. Sections look like this are grid of featured content like blog posts or podcast episodes or courses, looks like this, and so on. And once you give that to Claude Design, it has all of that concepts con that context there. There’s so many artificial intelligence, image generation tools out there, but I would encourage you to check out what you can do with Claude.

And the other thing I just wanna mention in terms of interactive lessons I’m trying to remember the guy’s name. I think it’s Tim. I saw a video. He’s an instructional designer who I. Has an instructional design community and he was showing how to create interactive content that you would make in a tool like articulate storyline or rise.

But doing it inside cloud design, which basically means club design can do what a really expensive. Tool like articulate storyline can do. And it’s not just like a one shot, Hey, build me a course about X. Or a experienced instructional designer is going to approach the claw design tool with a storyboard, a bunch of reference material, and so on.

So we’re building like a complex interactive lesson. What I love about this in the WordPress LMS space, like with lifter LMS, is it’s, you don’t have to just do videos or text space courses, like digital textbooks. You can give fancy, you can build interactive experiences teaching aids, quizzes and things like that.

That’s what the H five P. Technology is for, and there’s a WordPress plugin for bringing all that H five P interactive content in all. That is to say all these tools like the e-learning authoring tools like Articulate storyline, and many more, as well as interactive e-learning content creation tools like H five P Claude Design allows us to create these kinds of interactions.

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And then just easily embed them in our WordPress LMS lessons, which is pretty incredible that you can do that and essentially replace a really expensive tool, like how cloud design can replace Canva, it can replace Photoshop. There’s a lot of interesting things happening in terms of the power you’re getting with these AI tools.

And not only are you replacing a tool, it’s helping you actually use the tool and get the most out of it. So let’s talk about how to get leverage with Claude Cowork and the connectors. So it’s one thing to chat with ai. It’s another thing to give it access to your Google documents your calendar, your email inbox, and so on.

But this is where you go from chat to a agentic use of ai. You’re actually creating projects that maybe they’re on Aron job or a timer, and this, they’re gonna happen every day. So what am I talking about? The first thing to think about with Claude Cowork is that you can do file organization. So you can do research synthesis, you can do document prep, you can do data extraction from unstructured, files.

You could scrape content from an external resource to add to as raw materials for whatever you’re doing. So what are some of the most common connectors that you can connect with Claude? We’ve got Gmail, we’ve got Google Drive, we’ve got calendar systems. We’ve got Notion we can integrate Canva, Stripe, Figma.

These are all just example, other software tools that we could integrate with our connectors. So then instead of us as the human doing something, the Cowork tool could do that for us. What’s a practical example for a course creator? If the cowork has access to your email and you do email support for your students in your courses powered by lifter LMS, you could ask Claude to summarize last month’s student questions by Gmail, and then turn the top three into new lessons in your course.

So that would be an example of really. Leveraging Claude to look for patterns and not just find patterns and report back, but also create a learning asset that you can use going forward. You can also do business intelligence. So if Claude Cowork is connected to your Stripe account let’s say it could look in and just immediate, you could just ask it like, Hey, which one of my courses.

Converted the most last month, and then what do you recommend I focus on? Or something like that. Let’s say you have a huge catalog of courses. You can think about it as like chatting to your e-commerce analytics and that sort of thing. It’s super powerful. I’ve connected our Claude AI agent to our Google Analytics as well as our.

Podcast analytics. And now that because this business is almost 15 years old, been podcasting for almost 15 years. All, there’s so much data in the analytics, it’s almost overwhelming for me to look at. But I can talk to our Claude powered AI agent and just ask it to look for, Hey, what are the most popular topics?

It can basically look through Google Analytics, cross reference what’s going on in SoundCloud, our podcast hosting service, and help figure out like what kind of episodes are people most excited about and so on. It’s really blowing my mind of what, because the AI kind of has unlimited shelf space, whereas my brain can only hold so much analytics and data and reporting.

I’m able to be much more data-driven, informed, and deal with that data lake of a large amount of data that’s hard for the human to gr that the artificial intelligence can. The next thing I wanted to mention to you is using Claude to become a super coach. So what do by becoming a super coach.

The thing is, first we have the experts curse, which means sometimes it’s really hard for us as subject matter experts to teach to a beginner. ’cause we were already so far along, we kinda lost the beginner’s mind. Maybe We have so much information and skills and we’re not trained as a teacher, so we don’t know how to organize it or coach somebody effectively.

But. Using Claude you can take that body of knowledge and extract frameworks that are approachable to your coaching clients at the stage of development that they’re at, and solve the experts core curse In that way, the Claude can also help you construct your offer.

That’s a big part of the expert’s curse in that we have too much information. We tend to make our signature course too big ’cause we don’t know how to trim it down to what our target market needs. We’re building a, what I call a giant resource course, which won’t be effective. We may need to brainstorm the actual offer that we have with.

Ai how do I support my people? Should I do an online community? Should I do private coaching, group coaching? Should I do virtual events, office hours, all these things. And figuring out your offer as a coach is, super helpful. Especially even refining the basics like the customer avatar, who is my.

Coaching, ideal coaching client. What’s the ideal customer profile or student avatar? Some, a lot of great coaches will do an intake process where they need to take various data points on where the client is at. So if it, was a fitness coach, it might have to do with the fitness level, current fitness level.

If it was a business coach, we might need information around. The niche how, much our annual revenue is our team size and so on. If it was a relationship coach, we may need some history of what are the, your biggest parenting challenges or dating challenges and so on. And then what Claude can do is can help the coach prescribe and go into the course catalog.

Of resources already available that are relevant based on this person’s intake form of data for that client to get started with. So that’s just one example in terms of speeding up with the intake process. And if Claude has eyes on your current frameworks and stuff and you’re getting these intakes, it may identify a gap of a new.

A new framework that you could create or resource to help your clients get results that may be missing from your current offer. And I also just wanna men mention one of the things with Claude is a pro tip, A friend of mine over at very good plugins the team behind WP Fusion built a tool for persistent memory.

It’s a persistent memory layer for Claude called Auto Mem. So that’s at auto mem.ai. We use that with our agent to have the persistent memory. And once you get going with Claude in this way you, it’s almost like you can’t go back, like your mind’s blown when you first use chat GPT or where when you first use claude.ai, the chat interface.

But once you start working with agents, then the persistent memory comes into play. It feels like a super superpower. Yeah, so it’s, all about amplifying yourself and not replacing yourself. And these are just some pro tips on how to best use Claude. But I’m also just encouraging you to just go learn.

If you haven’t done the desktop app for Claude yet, do that. If you haven’t done cowork yet, do that, which is gonna get you started on the basics of agents. If you’ve never done Claude code, try it. Even if you’re not a developer, and learn how to type in the command line. I never thought I would do that in my life, but now I spend most of my time in Claude Code and I’m not a developer.

The output, my understanding clog code is the most powerful way to use that. And there’s different. Plan levels, right? So there’s like the $20 a month level, and I’m sure these prices can change. And, then there’s like the a hundred dollars a month level, and then there’s something called Max, which I think is $200 a month.

I’m currently at the $100 a month level. But just get started do the free stuff if you can afford it, get on the $20 a month starter premium plan to get more tokens, which just means that you’ll be able to do more with Claude. And then once you get up and your output is really getting strong, it makes sense.

I was like glad to upgrade to the a hundred dollars a month point because of how much value and time saving I was getting. It is, it’s a total. No brainer. Claude is a co-pilot. It’s not the captain. Do not give up your seat at the front of your education company. I have to do that. I have to try hard not to try, give too much to Claude.

And what I mean by that is. If you do the first 10% of the, like setting up the project, then Claude does the the middle 80% and then you do the last 10% to like Polish, introduce your unique insights and so on. That’s what I find is like really good. The idea that you spend the first 1% to give something to Claude and whatever comes out, it’s the finished product and you walk away.

That’s, I don’t recommend that. Even as Claude continues to improve always inject your humanity in the beginning, the during and the after. ’cause it’s gonna make a superior product. Whatever it is you’re working on, you still need other tools besides flawed. So Claude is disrupting a lot of things right now.

But you still may use other AI tools to do various things. You’ve still got video editing to do, video hosting to do. You’ve got your learning management system, lifter, LMS, and your WordPress site. This is a pro tip for you. I just want to encourage you, if you’re not necessarily all in on WordPress, keep an eye on the space because because of the open source nature of WordPress and the community around the project it is getting easier.

Even with Claude to quote Vibe code a website. But trust me, when I say at the end of the day, 95% of people are gonna want and need a content management system like WordPress and the LMS that sits on top of it like lifter LMS, to actually run the day-to-day and be a tool that both the AI and the humans.

Can really feel comfortable, stable, strong, and secure. And so Claude is the multiplier. Try it out if you have not done it yet. The smart playbook is augmentation, not replacement. The course creator, the top course creators in 2026 are using artificial intelligence as a force. Multiplier on top of human judgment.

And I would encourage you to do just try one cloud upgrade this week. Try the desktop app if you haven’t yet. Try cowork. Try design try cloud code if you haven’t tried it yet. And most importantly, if you’re really trying to get a course out and you haven’t done that yet. Go to the Lifter LMS Academy, that’s at academy dot lifter lms.com.

Look for the free course called How to Create an Online Course with Chat GBT. Jump into it. Every lesson has training, and then below it has a prompt that you can use to move forward in the course creation process. And just swap out Claude for chat, GPT. And I think you’re gonna be blown away at the results that you get.

If you know somebody, a course creator, who is just using cat GBT currently and hasn’t tried Claude and you’ve tried Claude yet, I would encourage you to tell your friends to give Claude a try, and also check out our course on creating an online course with ai. Always keep the human in there.

We want to amplify ourselves. Not replace ourselves to create the best work to help the most people with the impact from our online courses. Thank you for checking out this episode. We really appreciate it, and we’ll see you in the next one. Take care.

And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS Cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you [email protected] slash gift. Go to lifter lms.com/gift. Keep learning. Keep taking action, and I’ll see you. In the next episode.