How an AI-paired development process transformed engagement, understanding and access

Students were juggling costly, scattered resources and arriving at assessments underprepared. I built a free, hand-coded learning platform organised around the questions students actually ask, with AI tools as development partners and my own judgment as the editor.

The challenge

By 2024 students in my web design, digital marketing, entrepreneurship and analytics courses were pulling resources from several platforms, many of them expensive. Participation in asynchronous content was uneven and assignments showed surface-level understanding. The students were not uninterested; the resources did not fit how they learned, and textbook costs discouraged them before classes began.

The approach

1. Chose to build rather than buy: available products were too expensive, too generic or too complicated.
2. Set a content standard: current, practical and written for students as emerging professionals.
3. Paired AI tools with distinct roles (Claude for content architecture, Gemini for research synthesis, ChatGPT for rapid iteration) and critically evaluated every output.
4. Hand-coded the platform in PHP with accessibility and mobile responsiveness as core requirements.
5. Organised navigation around student questions rather than the order of the course outline.
6. Removed every cost barrier: no paywalls, subscriptions or required purchases.

The results

• Largest gains came from students who were initially at risk.
• Instructor time moved from resource navigation to applied learning.

Tools and methods

• PHP 8
• MySQL
• Claude
• Gemini
• ChatGPT
• Spotify
• Universal Design for Learning

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