Pestal guide·Course design
AI Course Generator for Teachers
Build a course, not just a collection of AI-generated lessons.
John Segreto, Founder of Pestal
Published September 2026 · Reviewed September 2026 · 15 min read
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Pestal is an AI course generator for teachers designed to turn a learning goal into a structured course that can be reviewed, edited, taught, assessed, and improved.
A teacher can begin with a subject, learning goal, time frame, student level, or instructional need. Pestal then helps organize that information into a course structure with lessons, instructional material, checks for understanding, and assessment materials inside one teaching workspace.
But generating more educational content is not the main problem Pestal is trying to solve.
The harder problem is making sure the pieces belong together.
A well-written lesson can still be the wrong lesson for a particular course. A good assessment question can still measure something students were never taught. Ten individually useful lessons do not necessarily make a coherent ten-lesson course.
An AI course generator therefore needs to do more than generate content.
It needs to help create a coherent learning experience.
What is an AI course generator for teachers?
An AI course generator for teachers is software that uses artificial intelligence to help transform learning goals, subject matter, instructional requirements, and teacher preferences into a structured course.
An AI lesson generator might create a lesson plan from a prompt.
An AI course generator has a larger job: it needs to coordinate multiple lessons and instructional decisions around a common learning goal.
That means establishing relationships between:
- what students are expected to learn;
- the order in which ideas are introduced;
- the lessons and examples students experience;
- the practice and assistance students receive;
- and the assessments used to determine what students understand.
Pestal is built around this broader definition.
Instead of treating every request as an isolated AI prompt, Pestal organizes course planning, lesson creation, assessment, practice, and review inside a persistent learning workspace.
What can an AI course generator create?
Depending on the teacher's goal, AI can help create:
- a course or unit structure;
- learning objectives;
- pacing and instructional sequence;
- individual lessons;
- explanations and direct instruction;
- worked examples;
- checks for understanding;
- common misconceptions or areas to watch;
- practice activities;
- assessment questions;
- question banks;
- unit assessments;
- review materials;
- and student learning support.
The important question is not simply how much content AI can generate.
It is whether those pieces form a sensible instructional system.
For teachers, course generation is therefore different from content generation.
Content generation
What can AI create?
Course generation
How should those pieces work together to help a learner reach a goal?
That difference is what we mean by instructional coherence.
Pestal's five-part test for a coherent AI-generated course
At Pestal, we think teachers can evaluate an AI-generated course using five basic questions.
- 1
Goal alignment
Does the course actually teach toward the intended learning goal?
The system needs to understand what the learner is supposed to know or be able to do before deciding what instructional material to create.
A course on quadratic functions for an introductory Algebra II class should not necessarily look like a review course on the same topic for advanced students preparing for an exam.
The topic may be identical.
The learning experience should not be.
Subject alone is not enough. The learner, goal, level, context, available time, and intended outcome all matter.
- 2
Scope and sequence
Are ideas introduced in an order that makes sense?
Course creation is partly a sequencing problem.
Later lessons often depend on knowledge developed earlier. Prerequisite ideas need to appear before students are expected to use them. Difficult concepts may require additional explanation, examples, or practice.
This is why generating ten independent lessons about the same topic does not necessarily create a ten-lesson course.
A course needs a path.
- 3
Instructional continuity
Does each lesson belong to the larger learning experience?
Teachers rarely design good courses by pretending each lesson exists in isolation.
A lesson should be developed with an understanding of:
- what students have already encountered;
- what this lesson is supposed to accomplish;
- what students will need later;
- and how the lesson contributes to the larger goal.
This is one reason Pestal separates course planning from lesson generation.
The course structure establishes instructional context. Lessons can then be created as parts of that structure rather than as unrelated documents.
- 4
Assessment alignment
Are students being assessed on what the course intended to teach?
Assessment should not be an unrelated document generated after the lessons are finished.
The learning process should remain connected:
Learning goal → instruction → practice → assessment → evidence
If instruction and assessment are created independently without shared context, teachers have to reconstruct that alignment themselves.
Pestal keeps assessment materials alongside the course structure so teachers can review whether assessment questions reflect what students were expected to learn.
The purpose of assessment is not simply to produce questions.
It is to collect evidence of learning.
- 5
Teacher control
Can the teacher inspect, change, remove, and improve what AI created?
AI-generated educational material should not be treated as automatically correct or classroom-ready.
Teachers understand their students, curriculum, subject, school, and instructional priorities in ways a generation system may not.
Teacher review therefore needs to be part of the workflow.
Pestal is designed so generated course material remains reviewable and editable. Teachers can inspect instructional material, revise content, change emphasis, and decide what ultimately belongs in their course.
AI can accelerate course creation.
It does not eliminate teacher judgment.
How does Pestal generate a course?
Pestal uses a structured course-generation workflow rather than treating course creation as one open-ended prompt.
Pestal course generation
- Instructional goal
- Course structure
- Structured lessons
- Assessment
- Review and refinement
1. Describe the instructional goal
Course generation begins with the instructional need.
For example:
Create a three-week honors Algebra II unit on quadratic functions. Students already understand linear functions. Include graphical, algebraic, and real-world representations, regular checks for understanding, modeling tasks, and an aligned unit assessment.
A course brief can communicate information such as:
- subject;
- student level;
- learning goals;
- course length;
- instructional priorities;
- pacing;
- existing knowledge;
- assessment expectations;
- and teaching preferences.
The goal is to give the system enough context to design around the intended learning experience rather than merely around a topic name.
2. Establish the course structure
Before every individual lesson is written, Pestal develops the larger course structure.
That structure establishes the context for decisions about:
- major topics;
- sequence;
- learning objectives;
- lesson progression;
- pacing;
- and assessment.
This matters because lesson generation should happen within a larger instructional plan.
The structure gives individual lessons a reason to exist.
3. Generate structured lessons within the course
Lessons are created within the context of the course plan.
A Pestal lesson can organize instruction around elements such as:
- Learning objective
- What should students understand or be able to do?
- Success criteria
- What would successful understanding look like?
- Direct instruction
- What needs to be explained?
- Worked examples
- How can important ideas be demonstrated?
- Checks for understanding
- Can students apply the idea before moving forward?
- Common mistakes or misconceptions
- Where are students likely to struggle?
- Takeaways and practice
- What should students retain and continue working on?
The appropriate instructional structure can vary by subject and learning goal.
The important architectural idea is that a lesson is not merely a block of generated text. It is structured instructional material that belongs to a larger course.
4. Develop assessment material in context
Teachers can develop assessment material alongside the course rather than treating assessment as an unrelated generation task.
Instead of beginning with:
Create 20 questions about quadratic functions.
a stronger instructional question is:
What evidence would show that students achieved the learning objectives of this course?
Those prompts may produce similar-looking questions, but they begin from different assumptions.
The first asks AI to generate content about a topic.
The second asks what students should be able to demonstrate.
That distinction matters because the purpose of assessment is not question generation.
It is evidence of learning.
5. Review and edit
Generated material remains available for teacher review and editing.
Teachers can inspect course structure, lesson content, assessment material, and instructional choices before deciding what to use.
This is an important part of the generation process.
Generating something quickly is only useful if the teacher can also understand, evaluate, and change what was generated.
6. Keep the course as a workspace
A course should not disappear when an AI conversation ends.
Pestal keeps course material inside a structured workspace so it can continue to be reviewed, edited, reused, and developed.
That allows course generation to become the beginning of an instructional workflow rather than the end of an AI prompt.
AI course generator vs. AI lesson plan generator
AI course generators and AI lesson plan generators solve related but different problems.
AI lesson generation compared with AI course generation
AI lesson generationCreates an individual lesson
AI course generationCreates a sequence of learning
AI lesson generationFocuses on one instructional period or topic
AI course generationCoordinates multiple lessons and objectives
AI lesson generationMay have little context about prior or future lessons
AI course generationMaintains a larger course context
AI lesson generationCan create an isolated activity or explanation
AI course generationOrganizes instruction toward a broader goal
AI lesson generationMay generate assessment separately
AI course generationCan connect assessment to course objectives
| AI lesson generation | AI course generation |
|---|---|
| Creates an individual lesson | Creates a sequence of learning |
| Focuses on one instructional period or topic | Coordinates multiple lessons and objectives |
| May have little context about prior or future lessons | Maintains a larger course context |
| Can create an isolated activity or explanation | Organizes instruction toward a broader goal |
| May generate assessment separately | Can connect assessment to course objectives |
Teachers may need both.
The distinction is not that course generators replace lesson generation.
It is that lesson generation happens inside a larger instructional structure.
Pestal treats the lesson as part of the course.
AI course generator vs. ChatGPT or a general AI chatbot
General-purpose AI tools can be extremely useful for teachers.
A teacher can ask a general AI chatbot to:
- explain a concept;
- suggest an activity;
- write a lesson plan;
- generate quiz questions;
- brainstorm examples;
- or outline a course.
Those capabilities are valuable.
The difference Pestal is designed around is continuity and structure.
Teaching involves relationships between information and decisions that develop over time.
A general AI conversation is organized around prompts. Pestal is organized around the learning experience.
A general AI conversation
- Prompt
- Response
- Another prompt
- Another response
Pestal learning experience
- Learning goal
- Course plan
- Lessons
- Practice and assistance
- Assessment
- Evidence
- Revision and adaptation
The distinction is not simply whether AI can generate a lesson.
It is what the system maintains around that lesson.
Why not generate every lesson separately?
Teachers can use AI to generate every lesson independently.
The challenge is what happens afterward.
Imagine separately generating:
- Lesson 1 on quadratic functions;
- Lesson 2 on quadratic functions;
- Lesson 3 on quadratic functions;
- a review activity;
- and a final assessment.
Every output might be useful on its own.
The teacher still has to determine:
- whether concepts are repeated unnecessarily;
- whether prerequisite knowledge appears before it is needed;
- whether difficulty progresses appropriately;
- whether important objectives were skipped;
- whether terminology remains consistent;
- and whether the assessment matches what students actually experienced.
That coordination work is part of course design.
Pestal's approach is to give AI the larger instructional structure in which those individual materials belong.
Can AI generate an entire course?
Yes. AI can help generate the structure and instructional materials for an entire course or unit.
But generating an entire course and designing a good course are not the same thing.
More generated content is not automatically better.
A useful course still requires decisions about:
- who the learners are;
- what they need to accomplish;
- how much time is available;
- which ideas matter most;
- what sequence supports understanding;
- what practice students need;
- and what evidence will demonstrate learning.
AI can accelerate those tasks.
Teachers still need to evaluate the instructional decisions the system makes.
Should teachers review AI-generated course material?
Yes.
Teachers should review AI-generated instructional material before using it with students.
AI-generated material can contain inaccuracies, inappropriate examples, unnecessary content, poor sequencing, or material that simply does not fit a particular classroom.
Review therefore needs to go beyond proofreading.
A teacher should ask:
- Is this accurate?
- Is it appropriate for my students?
- Does the sequence make sense?
- Is the level of difficulty appropriate?
- Are the examples useful?
- Are important ideas missing?
- Does the assessment match the instruction?
- Would I actually teach this?
Pestal is intentionally designed around teacher review and editing rather than treating generation as automatic publication.
Example: designing an Algebra II unit with AI
Suppose a teacher needs a three-week unit on quadratic functions.
The teacher might begin with:
Course goal: Build a three-week honors Algebra II unit on quadratic functions. Students understand linear functions and basic factoring. Students should be able to interpret, graph, transform, solve, and model with quadratic functions. Include regular checks for understanding, real-world modeling, and a unit assessment.
An AI course generator should not simply return a long document containing everything it knows about quadratic functions.
The generation process needs to establish a progression.
For illustration, that progression might look something like:
- 1
Understanding quadratic functions
Recognize quadratic relationships and connect equations, tables, and graphs.
- 2
Forms and graphical features
Connect standard, vertex, and factored forms to important features of a graph.
- 3
Transformations and solving
Develop methods for transforming functions and solving quadratic equations.
- 4
Modeling
Use quadratic functions to represent and analyze real situations.
- 5
Integration and assessment
Apply multiple representations and methods to unfamiliar problems and demonstrate the intended learning.
This is an illustrative example, not a required Pestal template.
A different group of students, time frame, learning goal, or instructional priority could produce a different structure.
That is the point.
AI course generation should not mean retrieving a fixed template for a topic.
It should mean developing an instructional path around a learning goal and a set of constraints.
What should teachers look for in an AI course generator?
When evaluating an AI course generator, we recommend asking seven questions.
- 1
Does it understand the learning goal?
Topic generation is not enough. The system should account for what learners are expected to accomplish.
- 2
Does it create a real sequence?
Look for progression rather than a list of disconnected lessons.
- 3
Do lessons know they belong to a course?
Individual materials should reflect the larger instructional context.
- 4
Are assessments connected to the instruction?
Students should be assessed on the learning the course was designed to develop.
- 5
Can the teacher inspect and edit the material?
AI should support teacher judgment rather than hide instructional decisions from the teacher.
- 6
Does the work persist?
A course should remain available for review and improvement instead of existing only as a sequence of chat responses.
- 7
Can the system connect learning to evidence?
This is the larger opportunity.
Faster content creation is useful, but a learning system becomes much more valuable when it can maintain the relationship between instruction, assistance, learner activity, assessment, and demonstrated understanding.
That last capability represents the broader direction Pestal is being built toward.
Pestal's approach: course generation is the beginning, not the end
Pestal started from a problem larger than course generation:
Teachers do not need more disconnected educational content. They need better ways to organize and understand the learning process.
We think a coherent learning system should maintain the relationship between seven things.
Pestal learning system
- Goal
- Instruction
- Activity
- Assistance
- Assessment
- Evidence
- Adaptation
- Goal
- What is the learner trying to accomplish?
- Instruction
- What was the learner taught?
- Activity
- What did the learner actually do?
- Assistance
- Where did the learner need help, and what help was provided?
- Assessment
- What was the learner asked to demonstrate?
- Evidence
- What does the resulting work tell us about understanding?
- Adaptation
- What should happen next?
This is the larger model behind Pestal.
Course generation establishes a learning path.
Lessons provide instruction.
Practice gives learners opportunities to develop understanding.
Assessment can provide evidence.
And over time, that evidence can help inform what the learner needs next.
This is why Pestal is being built as a structured learning workspace, not simply an AI writing tool.
Course generation is one part of that system.
What Pestal does today—and where it is going
It is useful to distinguish the course-generation workflow available in Pestal from the larger learning system we are building toward.
Pestal's current course-generation approach
Pestal is designed to help teachers:
- begin with an instructional goal;
- generate a structured course;
- create lessons within that course structure;
- organize instructional content into structured lesson components;
- develop assessment material alongside the course;
- review and edit generated material;
- and retain the course inside a persistent workspace.
Pestal keeps the course, lessons, and checks as separate pieces you can edit, instead of treating a generated course as one long AI answer.
The broader direction
The longer-term goal is to connect course creation with what happens after a learner begins working through the course.
That means maintaining relationships between:
goal → instruction → activity → assistance → assessment → evidence → adaptation
The objective is not simply to generate more personalized-looking content.
It is to build a system that can eventually adapt learning based on evidence of what a learner actually understands.
That is a larger problem than AI course generation, and it is the problem Pestal is being built to address.
Who can use an AI course generator?
- Classroom teachers
- Create new units, reorganize curriculum, develop lessons, and build assessment material around a learning goal.
- Department and curriculum leaders
- Develop common course structures that teachers can review and adapt for their own instructional context.
- Tutors
- Build focused learning paths around a particular learner, goal, topic, or assessment.
- Schools
- Develop reusable instructional material in a structured environment rather than distributing course components across unrelated documents and tools.
- Independent educators and course creators
- Turn subject-matter expertise into organized learning experiences containing instruction, practice, and assessment.
The appropriate workflow and level of review will differ depending on the learner, subject, and context.
Frequently asked questions
What is an AI course generator?
An AI course generator uses artificial intelligence to help turn learning goals, subject matter, instructional requirements, and other constraints into a structured course. A course generator may help develop course structure, objectives, lessons, practice, and assessment material rather than generating each item independently.
What is the best way to use AI to create a course?
Start with the learning goal rather than immediately asking AI to generate lessons. Define the learner, expected outcome, available time, important constraints, and assessment needs. Establish the course structure first, then develop lessons and assessment material within that structure.
Can AI generate an entire course?
AI can help generate a course structure, units, objectives, lessons, practice, and assessment material. Generating those materials does not guarantee that the resulting course is accurate, well sequenced, appropriate for a particular learner, or instructionally coherent. Teacher review remains important.
Can AI write a complete curriculum?
AI can assist with curriculum structures, units, objectives, lessons, practice, and assessment material. Teachers and curriculum leaders should still review scope, sequence, accuracy, instructional choices, and assessment alignment before using the resulting curriculum.
Can AI create lesson plans for teachers?
Yes. AI can generate lesson plans, explanations, examples, activities, and checks for understanding. In a course-generation system, those lessons can also be developed within the context of a larger course rather than generated independently.
What is the difference between an AI course generator and an AI lesson plan generator?
An AI lesson plan generator primarily creates an individual lesson. An AI course generator coordinates multiple lessons and objectives around a larger learning goal. Course generation therefore requires decisions about scope, sequence, continuity, and assessment alignment in addition to lesson creation.
Can AI generate tests and assessments?
AI can generate assessment questions and practice material. The more important instructional challenge is ensuring those assessments measure the objectives and instruction students actually experienced.
Should teachers review AI-generated lessons?
Yes. Teachers should review AI-generated instructional material for accuracy, appropriateness, sequencing, difficulty, missing concepts, useful examples, and alignment between instruction and assessment before using it with students.
Can teachers edit courses generated by Pestal?
Pestal is designed around teacher review and editing. Generated material is intended to be inspected and refined rather than automatically accepted or published.
Does Pestal replace teachers?
No. Pestal is designed to help teachers plan, create, organize, assess, and refine learning experiences. Teachers remain responsible for instructional judgment and for deciding what material they use with students.
Is Pestal an LMS?
Pestal is better described as an AI-powered structured learning workspace. It is being built to connect course creation, instruction, learning activity, assistance, assessment, evidence, and adaptation rather than functioning only as a traditional LMS or general-purpose AI chatbot.
Can I use Pestal for just one unit?
Yes. A Pestal course workspace does not need to represent a full academic-year course. It can be used for a unit, short sequence, review course, or another focused learning experience.
Can Pestal create courses for subjects other than math?
Pestal is intended to support courses across subjects. Instructional strategy, lesson structure, examples, and assessment needs can vary substantially by discipline, so course generation should account for more than the subject name alone.
A better question than "Can AI create my course?"
AI can generate a remarkable amount of educational material.
That is no longer the most interesting question.
The more useful questions are:
- Does the course have a clear goal?
- Do the lessons belong together?
- Does the sequence support learning?
- Does the assessment measure what was taught?
- Can the teacher understand and control what AI created?
- And eventually, can the learning experience adapt based on evidence of what the student actually understands?
Those are the questions Pestal is built around.