Documents & collections

A course is built in two layers: the blueprint you plan, and the course materials assembled from it. Reusable and time-bound files live in three collections. Once you see the shape, you always know where a thing belongs.

Two layers: the blueprint and the course

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 plan a concise blueprint; AI assembles it into the polished course materials, centered on the study guide.

You work at the top. The blueprint is your plan — short, plain text, quick to change. The course is the set of polished documents students receive, assembled from the blueprint, largely by AI. You decide what to teach and how to assess it; the careful editing work is handled for you.

The blueprint — what you plan

The blueprint is where the thinking lives. It stays concise and plain-text on purpose, so it’s easy to write and easy to maintain:

  • The concept map — the concepts you’ll teach, how they connect, and the learning objectives for each.
  • The assessment guide — how each concept should be assessed across homework, quizzes, and exams (instructions, not a question bank).

Together they are the framework of the course. Change the blueprint and everything downstream can be brought back in line with it — the coherence check compares your finished materials against this intent.

The course — assembled from the blueprint

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derived documents — slides, practice, and a concept map — each linked back to it so a change in the guide flags what is out of date.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 center of the course materials; slides, practice, quizzes, and exams organize around it and stay traceable.

The course materials are the finished, public-facing documents: the study guide, slides, practice, quizzes, and exams — with real structure, layout, and visual design. The study guide is the center; the others organize around it and stay linked to it, so when it changes, Alembic flags what has drifted.

The heavy editing — accuracy, accessibility, copyright, structure, format, and layout — is done by AI agents following agent skills, which makes the result far cleaner than editing each document by hand. coursewerk is the pipeline that guides an agent to assemble a whole course package from your blueprint, ready to upload.

Whoever does the editing, every file keeps a markdown source of truth — you can edit it in the Alembic workspace, or download it and edit it locally.

Collections: where the rest lives

Three collections: Assets, Current, and PrivateAssets holds reusable figures and files. Current holds this term's announcements and assignments. Private, marked with a lock, holds instructor-only materials.
Assets are reusable and shared; Current is this term; Private is yours alone.

Alongside the documents, three collections hold everything else — each with a clear job:

Assets
Reusable figures, chemical structures, plots, data, and media. Insert an asset into any document, and cite it from anywhere — it lives in one place and is shared across the course.
This term
The current teaching cycle: announcements and assignments for the class you're running now. (In the workspace this collection is labeled “Current (this term)”.) Roll over to a new term and last term's materials are kept, read-only, for reference.
Private
Instructor-only materials — answer keys, teaching notes, exam content. Everything here stays on the private side and never reaches students.