SA tech entrepreneur sees early success with AI course builder
Travis Clapp’s latest innovation has taken off overseas, with Coursebox offering users the ability to create a learning course in under an hour.
Coursebox co-founders Travis Clapp and Alex Hey. Photo: Provided.
It’s been just two months since artificial intelligence-powered course building platform Coursebox was unveiled to the world, and in that time 5,000 customers from 134 countries have subscribed.
It’s a tale of international success for Coursebox – co-founded by Perth-based marketing specialist Alex Hey and InDaily 40 Under 40 alum Travis Clapp – which takes advantage of recent advancements in the generative AI space.
Powered by US tech giant Open AI’s ground-breaking technology, Coursebox helps users create courses quickly and painlessly.
The simple layout lets users describe their course, provide guidance on how long it should take to complete and define the target users. It then spits out an editable course, and users can let the AI automatically write content for the pages.
InDaily trialled the software and found it created a three-lesson course into the fundamentals of news writing aimed at university students in under five minutes, complete with lessons on news values, fact-checking and bias. It even created short quizzes for each course component.
The co-founders told InDaily that Coursebox supports 950 different languages, but the two countries where it has been most popular to date are the United States and Egypt – success in the latter being due to an influencer’s promotion of the tool.
Clapp said the product was quite different until recently.
“At first, we were going down a Canva sort of route – making it the Canva of course building. But the dream was that you’d just put in your resources and it would spit out a course using AI,” said Clapp, who previously founded learning tech scaleup Opentute.
“But along came Open AI and it solved part of the problem for us, and so we were able to quickly pivot what we were doing.
“We really feel like we’re at the front here globally for course building with AI.”
According to the co-founders, Coursebox is being used by corporate trainers and entrepreneurs looking to sell courses.
“Organisations who want to privately train their staff or entrepreneurs that are looking to make an income selling courses – those are probably the two biggest markets we’ve seen, but we do get educational institutes as well.”
