Step 1 — Structure It with Cowork

Turning a pile of research into a clear course outline — by delegating the whole job.

Cowork~12 min

The big idea

The first move in building a course is structure, and it’s the perfect job for Cowork — Claude’s agentic desktop mode. You point it at the research (here, a dossier on AI for small business), give a plain-English goal (‘turn this into a course like my others’), and it does the multi-step work: reads the material, proposes modules and lessons, asks a couple of clarifying questions where it’s genuinely unsure, and produces a phased build plan you approve before anything is built. You steer; it executes.

Key insight: The shift is from ‘write me a prompt’ to ‘do this whole job, and check with me at the forks.’ You delegate the outcome and supervise the result.

What you’ll see

A research document becoming a structured, phased plan on screen.

How Cowork structures a course

Four habits that make it work. Tap to expand.

Key points to remember

Cowork is the right surface for structuring a course from research.

Give it the outcome, not a prompt; let it plan the steps.

Let it ask clarifying questions and produce a phased plan you approve.

You steer and approve; it does the multi-step work.

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