#Core ideas

Your course lives in a package— one course’s study guides, slides, practice, figures, and instructor materials, with two halves: a public side for everything students see, and a private side for answer keys, exams, and your own notes. That separation is physical, not a setting you can forget to switch: private material simply cannot cross into the public side.

Behind the scenes this is professional version control — the same machinery software teams use to track history and never lose work. But you never see any of it. You save, preview, publish, take a named snapshoteach term (“Fall 2026”), restore exactly what you taught, cite a fixed version, adapt someone else’s work, and share — never a branch, a commit, or a merge.

When you publish, Alembic moves your course out of its temporary storage and into your own space on GitHub— the account you signed in with — where it’s served as a website. It’s yours, and it keeps working with or without Alembic; Alembic is only the bridge.

You work at the top, on a short, plain-text blueprint— a concept map of what you’ll teach and how it connects, and an assessment guide for how each concept is judged. From that plan the course materials — study guide, slides, practice, quizzes, exams — are assembled, with the study guide at their center.

The tedious part of making a document — consistent formatting, accessibility, spelling and grammar, tightening language, keeping every piece of the course in agreement — is exactly what AI does well, and Alembic guarantees the parts that are easy to get wrong. Your part is the substance: the direction, the raw draft, and the details that matter. Alembic itself is free and open; only the AI assistant is metered. How a course gets built, and what’s guaranteed →

Alembic’s documents are self-contained files: a page, a slide deck, or a print document, each one a single file that opens in any browser to read, present, or print — with an editor built into the file itself. Under every document is a markdown source of truth: edit it in the Alembic workspace, or download the file and edit it locally — either way it stays the same document, editable forever with nothing to install.

Because the editor travels with the file, your students can keep their own copies too — annotate, highlight, and add worked examples offline, in a copy that is entirely theirs and never touches your original. And copying from a rendered page copies the markdown source — not just the text but the rich formatting, tables, equations, and chemical structures — ready to paste straight into another Alembic document or any markdown editor. These formats come from the orz-markdown family.

You don’t need a finished course to contribute. A single clear illustration, a well-worked derivation, a clean explanation of one stubborn concept — small pieces like these are exactly what other educators search for. Anything on Discover can be adapted: take a resource, make it fit your students, and attribution travels automatically. If you improve something you adapted, you can suggest the change back — the original author reviews it in plain language and accepts with one click.

Next, see how a course actually gets built — and what Alembic guarantees so you don’t have to check it by hand.