There are a lot of people getting a little antsy about other people (usually ‘kids these days’) using LLM and related tools to help them stop thinking. Frankly that doesn’t sound like a great idea, and I don’t think the issue is confined to ‘the kids’.

It’s funny, since one of my favourite uses for LLMs is to create personalised training courses, to make me think more!

At the bottom of the resources page on this site, I link to a romance writing course I created with ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. And for those rolling their eyes, try writing a non-cringe romance story, it’s hard!

And, yes, that DIY course did help.

More recently, I’ve been asked to fill in and teach a class on using Canva to create presentations and brochures. I know and like Canva, but tend to use it for web and social media stuff – mostly images with text and banners. Which meant I needed a crash course on the presentation and print side of Canva, with side serves of brand identity and effective visual design.

This time, I just went with ChatGPT, but I’m pretty confident you could drop this into any of the big LLMs and get a decent starting point.

This is the prompt I used:

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I want to learn how to use Canva better, specifically for presentations and brochures. Please create a course for me that covers the following areas:

• Foundations of Canva: features, strengths, weaknesses, foundational skills
• Using Canva to create presentations and brochures to engage and influence audiences and potential customers, this needs to focus on both the design skills and the digital/Canva competence to ensure the message is clearly and effectively communicated
• Specific Canva skills need to include choosing and using templates, choosing styles, curating graphics and exporting to print or digital display
• Design skills need to include identifying the audience and purpose of the presentation or brochure, structuring the presentation or brochure in a way that reflects and supports the purpose while also creating an engaging narrative, identifying and developing your brand, style and content on Canva

The course needs to be about 10 sessions long, with each session being about half an hour. All resources need to be free and created/published in the past 12 months. I want it to be practical and include hands-on exercises. We’ll be using the free version of Canva.

What other information do you need to be able to create this course?

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Since the Canva interface changes pretty frequently as they bring in new features and capabilities, I wanted to make sure I got recent resources, that were reasonably in tune with the Canva screen I was looking at. Plus, when I don’t put a time frame in, the result is often broken links.

It asked me a bunch of questions, I answered, and then it gave me a 10 session course outline, with the learning focus for each session, a practical exercise, and an information resource. No broken links this time, but I forgot to put a time boundary on them (and I’m not sure it would have helped if I had).

These are supposed to be 30 minute sessions, with the time split about half half between the learning and the exercise. The video for the first lesson is 2 hours long, so about an hour and 45 minutes over the preferred duration.

Similarly, a couple of the lessons just pointed me at the Canva YouTube channel, which was annoying. In both cases, a simple search within that channel brought up a really nice playlist on branding and design respectively, completely in line with the lessons in question.

You can find the course outline, with original links, and my preferred options in the Notes column, on this Notion page. I’m not going to try and put it in here as it’s a fairly large table and it would play havoc with any screen size less than a good-sized laptop.

And to prove I did learn something, I created a colouring zine (with template on the first page, colouring ‘book’ on the second). If you want to download the second page to print, you can find that below.

(And it should download, even if it says the document has failed to load, but please let me know if it doesn’t. )

The pictures were generated in Ideogram.

In all, this created a great framework and starting point for my self-directed learning, but I needed to adapt and improve the output to make it truly useful. Feels familiar.