Yes — give AI your topic, your audience, and the outcome you want them to achieve, and it will generate a prioritized list of the core concepts they need. It’s a fast way to cut through information overload and find the essential five before you build a single slide.
The Problem With Building From Everything You Know
When you know a topic well, it’s hard to know what to leave out. You can see all the nuance, all the exceptions, all the advanced considerations. Your students can’t — and loading them with everything you know produces overwhelm, not learning. The hardest part of designing a new module isn’t finding content. It’s deciding what the five things are.
This is sometimes called the curse of knowledge: the more you know, the harder it is to teach the basics without over-complicating them. AI doesn’t have that curse for your specific audience — it can look at a topic freshly and prioritize based on what a beginner genuinely needs.
How to Use AI to Find the Core Five
The key is giving AI a complete picture of who your students are and what they need to be able to do. A vague prompt — “What are the top 5 things to know about AI prompting?” — gives you a generic list. A specific prompt gives you something teachable.
Try this structure: “My students are coaches and consultants aged 45–60 who are just starting to use AI in their business. They want to get better results from ChatGPT without spending hours on trial and error. What are the top 5 concepts they need to understand about writing effective prompts — prioritized by what will make the biggest practical difference fastest?”
That prompt produces a focused, audience-specific list you can actually build lessons around. Ask Claude to explain its reasoning for the order too — why is concept one more important than concept three? That reasoning helps you understand the learning logic, not just the list.
You can also run this as a validation check on an outline you’ve already built. Paste your planned modules and ask: “Based on this audience and outcome, is there anything critical I’m missing? Is anything here that a complete beginner doesn’t actually need in their first module?”
What This Means for Educators
Courses that feel focused and purposeful outperform courses that feel comprehensive. Students are busy. They want the essentials that work, not the encyclopedia. AI helps you find that focused core before you invest time in building content — so every lesson earns its place in your course.
The Simple Rule
Before you open a slide deck, ask AI: “What are the top 5 things my specific audience needs to know about this topic to achieve this specific outcome?” Prioritize those five. Everything else is optional depth for later modules. This single habit produces cleaner, more completable courses.