In this article you'll follow the five stages for creating your first course on Beeline, from plan to publish.
A course on Beeline is called a Beeline, and building one follows a simple, repeatable five-stage process: plan, outline, write, build, and quality-check. You don't need to be an instructional designer or an AI expert — just follow the stages below. AI does much of the heavy lifting at every stage, but you stay in control of the final quality.
Good courses start with a plan, not a blank page. Begin with the why: tie your course to a real goal (reduce onboarding time, improve product knowledge, strengthen compliance) and answer what should change after someone completes this? Picture your audience — what they already know and how much time they have — and write clear, measurable learning objectives (see "How to write effective learning objectives").
You can plan in whatever format suits you. If you prefer working in a regular document, use the Beeline Storyboard template — a structured planning document you can copy and fill in at your own pace: Beeline Storyboard template.
If you'd rather let AI do the heavy lifting, the Beeline Storyboard Skill is a guided assistant (built on Claude) that turns your existing materials — slides, documents, notes, even meeting transcripts — into a structured course plan, one step at a time. Your Customer Success Manager will share it with you: Beeline Storyboard Skill. To use it, copy the starter prompt from the folder into a new Claude chat and attach your materials — or upload the skill file to Claude (Settings → Capabilities → Skills) to have it always on hand.
Whichever way you plan, sort out your content before your media, so you don't redo work later.
Turn your plan into a course outline with the Beeline Course Creator GPT or the Gemini GEM. Give it your plan and your final source documents, ask it to generate the sections and lessons, then review the outline against your goal, audience, and sources — refining with follow-up prompts ("make it shorter", "reduce to 3–5 lessons per section") until it fits.
Keep working in the same AI tool — it already holds your course context. Draft one lesson at a time so you can review as you go, then generate assessments that align with your objectives (if an objective says "apply", the questions should test application, not recall). Plan any media last, so it supports the content rather than repeating it. (See "Use AI to write your lesson content".)
Create the Beeline (Quick Actions → Create Beeline → Build Manually) and open its Settings to add the name, description, learning outcomes, cover image, and certificate. Build the structure first — all your sections and cells, named and set to the right type — then paste in your content, media, and assessment cells. (See "Create sections and cells (lessons) in your Beeline" and "Configure your Beeline settings".)
💡 Pro tip: Start small. A focused 10-minute Beeline that solves one real problem is often more effective — and far quicker to build — than a sprawling course. You can always add more later.
Before anyone sees it, preview in Learn Mode, test on both web and mobile, and run a quick QA check: spelling and formatting, media loads, assessments are correct, and the structure matches your plan. When it's right, publish your sections and lessons (set their status), then assign the Beeline to a group or user — a course is only visible to learners once it's assigned.
The fastest route brings stages 2–4 inside the platform: AI Build Mode takes your audience, goal, and source material and generates a persona, objectives, outline, and lesson content as a ready-to-edit draft Beeline. Ask your Customer Success Manager to learn more.