An AI course generator for iPhone that shows you the plan first

You want to learn something properly, on your phone, and one long answer in a chat window isn't going to cut it. Learnfold is an iPhone and iPad app that turns a question, a web link, a PDF, notes, Markdown or a photo into a course. It shows you a course plan, waits for you to approve it, and then writes the lessons section by section, so you can start reading while the rest is still being written.

What a course generator should produce

People who search for an AI course generator usually want a structured set of lessons and a way to test themselves, and they want it from something they already have, like a topic or a document. A useful course needs a few more things than a pile of text.

• A structure you can see before you commit. If the outline is wrong, the rest will be too.
• Lessons short enough to finish. A page you can read on the bus is a page you will actually read.
• A way to ask when something doesn't make sense. Questions show up mid-sentence, not at the end of a chapter.
• A way to check what stuck. Optional, because sometimes you just want to read.
• A place to come back to. If you can't find last week's lesson, you end up asking the same question again.

Here is how Learnfold handles each of those.

How Learnfold writes a course

The plan comes first

You type a question or attach a source. Learnfold proposes a course plan and nothing gets written until you approve it. If the plan heads somewhere you didn't mean, don't approve it. Start again with a sharper question. There's a guide on writing better questions for an AI tutor if you want help with that part.

Lessons are written section by section

After you approve the plan, lessons are written one section at a time. You can read the first section while later ones are still being written. Lessons are short pages, and where a picture explains something better than a paragraph, the page includes an interactive picture. One example in the app is a flower that switches between the human view and the ultraviolet view a bee gets, the same idea behind our explainer on what bees see.

Every lesson ends with a choice

At the bottom of each lesson, "Where next?" offers four directions.

• Go deeper gives more detail on something the page mentioned briefly.
• Go sideways opens a related or opposite idea.
• Zoom out shows the bigger picture.
• Your own question is for whatever you were actually wondering.

Picking one writes a new page, linked to the lesson it came from. New pages are written in the background and a small banner tells you when one is ready, so you can keep reading.

Checks, if you want them

A page can end with an optional check. That might be multiple choice, a written answer, or a guided discussion. You get feedback on what you got right, and a wrong answer can turn into a conversation about why.

How it differs from a single chat answer

A chatbot answer is a good tool for a quick question. It gets awkward around the fifth follow-up, when the bit you needed is somewhere up the scroll and the conversation has drifted three topics away.

Learnfold uses AI to write explanations too, so the same caution applies. AI makes mistakes, and you should check anything important against a reliable source. Our guide on checking AI explanations for mistakes has a method. What changes is where the explanations go. They live on pages that link to each other. The course map shows every page you opened, with a "You are here" marker. You can ask about a whole page or a selected passage, and those discussions are saved so you can reopen them later. Some answers stay in the chat and some become pages of their own. When you come back, Continue drops you on the exact page and spot where you left off.

You can also change what was written. Edit any page yourself, or ask the AI to rewrite a section. If you want the longer version of this comparison, read Learnfold vs ChatGPT for learning.

Choosing which AI writes it

You pick the AI that writes your course.

• Learnfold Cloud is Learnfold's own AI service. Nothing to set up, no account or API key. It is included in the Cloud and Studio plans, and daily usage limits apply.
• Codex is OpenAI's agent, using your own OpenAI API key or another compatible service. The provider charges you separately.
• Hermes is an AI agent you run on your own computer or server. Learnfold connects to it.

Which models you can use depends on your device, system version and provider. Plans are monthly App Store subscriptions, listed at learnfold.app/#pricing. Plus is for bringing your own provider, and Learnfold's own AI comes with the Cloud or Studio plan. The app itself needs no account, and you can read the starter practice course without a subscription, so you can see the format before you pay.

Your prompts and sources leave the phone with all three. Learnfold Cloud sends them to Learnfold's cloud service and an AI model provider, as the privacy policy explains. Codex sends them to OpenAI or the compatible service you connect, and Hermes to whichever model it runs, so check that provider's terms.

If you're building a course for other people

If you are a teacher looking to build a course to sell or assign to a class, a course authoring tool will suit you better. Learnfold writes a course for the one person reading it, and the course changes shape as that person asks questions. There is no certificate or accreditation at the end.