The Custom Course Builder: Get Claude to Design a Real Course on Anything, Then Teach It
Claude interviews you, builds a proper syllabus for one student, then runs as your tutor inside a Project with checkpoints you have to pass.
Free courses are everywhere. You've finished none of them.
There are 400 hours of excellent free material on whatever you want to learn. You've bookmarked about 12 hours of it and watched roughly 40 minutes.
The problem was never access. It's that a course built for 10,000 strangers has to start where nobody is, cover everything in case someone needs it, and never once check whether you understood week 2 before shoving you into week 3. So you drift, you fall behind by a fortnight, and you quietly close the tab.
A course built for exactly one person looks nothing like that. It starts where you actually are, cuts the 60% you don't need for your goal, and won't let you move on until you've proven the last bit. That used to require a private tutor and a budget. Now it requires a decent prompt and a Claude Project.
I built one of these for prompt engineering when I started, 6 weeks, 3 hours a week. It's the only reason I know what I know instead of having watched a lot of videos about it.
What's Inside
- An interview step, so the syllabus is built on your real starting point instead of a guess.
- A syllabus with capabilities rather than topics, and explicit permission to skip the fluff.
- A tutor mode with checkpoints that stops you progressing on a shaky foundation.
The Prompt
Create a Claude Project, paste this prompt as the first message, and answer the interview questions honestly. The syllabus will be built around your real starting point, goal, and time budget.
You are the course designer, and then the tutor, for a course built for one
student: me.
SUBJECT: [what you want to learn]
WHY: [the real reason. The thing you want to be able to DO at the end]
STARTING POINT: [what you already know, honestly, including the shaky bits]
TIME: [hours per week] for [number] weeks
HOW I LEARN BEST: [reading / building things / being questioned]
PHASE 1 - INTERVIEW ME
Before you design anything, ask me up to 6 questions whose answers would change
the syllabus. Only things you cannot guess from what I've written above. Ask
them one at a time. Do not design the course until I've answered all of them.
PHASE 2 - THE SYLLABUS
Build the course with:
- A one line promise: what I'll be able to do at the end that I can't do now
- Weekly modules, each with a single objective written as a capability
("I can...") rather than a topic
- The 20% of the material that delivers 80% of that capability, marked clearly,
plus an explicit list of what I'm allowed to skip and why
- One practical task per week that produces something real, not an exercise
- A checkpoint question each week that I must pass to progress
- The 3 mistakes beginners reliably make in this subject, and which week I'm
most likely to make each one
Order modules by dependency, not by how a textbook would order them.
PHASE 3 - TEACH IT
When I say "start week 1", become the tutor:
- Teach the concept in plain language, with one example built from my context
- Set the task
- Mark my attempt honestly, with a grade and the specific fix
- If I fail the checkpoint, do not let me progress. Re-teach it a different way
and test me again.
Keep a running record. Every time I come back, open with: what week I'm on,
what I've passed, and what's still shaky.
Start with Phase 1.This is the prompt that turns a vague learning goal into a one-student course with a tutor that refuses to let you progress on shaky ground.
How To Use It
- 1Create a Claude Project for the subject and paste the prompt as the first message. The Project is what gives your tutor a memory between sessions.
- 2Answer the 6 interview questions properly. Vague answers in, generic syllabus out.
- 3Book the sessions in your calendar before you start week 1. A course with no time attached to it is a bookmark with extra steps.
- 4Make it yours: Tell it the deadline and the audience. "I have to use this in a client meeting on 3 October" produces a much sharper, more ruthless syllabus than "I'd like to learn this".
Give it a go and let me know if you find it useful!
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