How a course gets built

You stay on the high ground — deciding what to teach, and what is ready. The slow, error-prone parts of making a document — formatting, attribution, accessibility, keeping a whole course consistent — are exactly what AI does well. Here is how that help works, and what Alembic guarantees so you don't have to check it by hand.

You lead; AI handles the details

Your plain-text blueprint is assembled by AI into the course materialsOn the left, a concise blueprint — a concept map of linked ideas and a checklist of objectives, in copper. An arrow marked with a spark shows AI assembling it into the finished course materials on the right: a central study guide with slides and practice around it.
You supply the substance and the direction; AI turns it into clean, consistent course materials. Nothing is final until you approve it.

Your part is the substance: a concept map of what you’ll teach and how it connects, an assessment guide for how each idea is judged, a raw draft, and the calls that need a teacher’s judgment. AI’s part is the craft: consistent formatting, real alt text, tightened language, correct notation, and a course whose pieces agree with one another.

How much you write depends on the course. For introductory topics, where good open material already exists, AI can do most of the assembly from your outline. For advanced or specialized courses, where little public material exists, you supply more of the raw content — and AI still turns it into clean, accessible, well-structured documents. Either way you decide what to teach and what is ready; AI never publishes anything on its own, and you review before anything is final.

Two ways to get AI's help

In the workspace, on one document. As you edit a study guide or a deck, you can ask the assistant for a focused pass — check spelling and grammar, improve the language, check accessibility, tidy the formatting, or suggest a slide layout. Each is a scoped edit you see and approve, and it never disturbs your citations, links, or equations — the stable markers that make a document quotable stay exactly as they were.

Or build a whole package with an AI agent. When you want to draft an entire course from your sources, an AI assistant (in a chat tool like Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT) can drive Coursewerk — a guided recipe that walks the assistant through assembling a complete package: the concept map, study guides, slides, practice, and figures, each checked as it goes. It pauses at every major step for your review, and hands you a finished package you upload to Alembic as a single file. Same guarantees below apply either way.

What Alembic guarantees

The study guide is the spine; other documents derive from itA central study guide, drawn in copper, feeds three derived documents — slides, practice, and a concept map — each linked back to it so a change in the guide flags what is out of date.
The study guide is the spine. Change it, and Alembic flags the slides and practice that derive from it — so nothing quietly falls out of step.

These are the tedious checks that are easy to get wrong by hand, so Alembic makes them structural — not a setting you can forget:

  • Clean provenance and attribution. Every figure has to prove a clean origin — you made it, or it’s openly licensed with its source recorded. The attribution list is compiled from those records rather than kept by hand, so it can never drift out of date, and nothing without a clear source slips in.
  • Accessibility, built in. Alt text on every figure, headings that don’t skip levels, and meaning that never rides on color alone — checked as the course is built, not bolted on at the end.
  • A course that stays consistent. The study guide is the spine; the slides, practice, and concept map derive from it. Change the guide and Alembic flags exactly which of them now need another look, so an edit never quietly leaves the rest out of step.
  • Formatting that always renders. The rich formatting — callouts, columns, tables, equations, chemical structures — is validated so a document always displays correctly, with no broken layout waiting to surprise a student.

None of this asks you to become an accessibility auditor or a copyright lawyer. You keep your attention on the teaching; the checks keep the course clean.

Free platform, metered AI

Alembic itself is free and open to use. Organizing, previewing, publishing, and sharing cost nothing. The AI assistant is the one part that costs something to run, so it works on credits — covered by a sponsor or grant, or purchased — which keeps the platform free for everyone. You can always do the writing yourself; the assistant is there to take the tedious work off your hands, not to stand between you and your course.

Next, see exactly what a package holds and what each part is for.