Platforms such as Thinkific and Teachable let you put together interactive courses based on text, images, lessons and quizzes. Typically, you’ll start with a static document like a PDF or PowerPoint presentation, and parse it into bite-sized lessons, with an overview followed by a hands-on exercises, possibly followed by an independent lab — and ultimately, a PDF Certificate of Completion. We can use ChatGPT to recreate all these features.
ChatGPT offers a service where, if you have the paid subscription, you can create your own chatbot with a custom set of instructions and uploaded documents. You can even save it to OpenAI’s app store where other people can try it. Instead of being called an “app,” though, it is called a “GPT.” To create your own GPT, head over to https://chatgpt.com/gpts/editor. An empty GPT looks like this:
The process of creating it is surprisingly straightforward, and if you click on the “Create” tab, ChatGPT will lead you through it, step by step.
The “Instructions” field, as you would imagine, is where you provide the goal and workflow of the GPT. To create a training GPT, you just need to specify the content for each lesson and how the GPT should interact with the user:
- Overview of the concept, the learning objectives and any details you want to convey
- How the GPT should challenge the user to prove they’ve learned the details of the lesson
For example, let’s say you were building an interactive Excel class, the GPT instructions might look like this:
As part of the instructions, you can suggest a final exam and then generate a PDF Certificate of Completion, although this doesn’t always look particularly good, even when we supplied our GPT with a background template. The instructions were:
- Based on the content in the lessons, create a 10-question multiple choice final exam with a passing score of 70% or higher.
- If they pass the final exam, then ask for their full name and generate a single-page PDF Certificate of Completion, with the following information: their name, the current date, and the course title. Indicate that they have completed all the lessons, exercises, and final exam.
When you click on the “Create” button to spawn your new GPT, you will be given the choice of whether to make it usable for yourself only, anyone with the URL, or whether it should be searchable in the “Explore GPTs” page. You can also supply a few “Conversation starters” which appear as buttons the user can click to prefill and submit their prompt. When it’s done, it might look something like this:
