Create a summary for your course lessons with co-pilot
If you create any sort of video content for your community, you’ll know that including transcripts can be really valuable to your members—they make it easier to follow along and improve accessibility. But what about members who prefer to have the most important information available at a glance? How do you accommodate members who learn in different ways without significantly adding to your workload?
Our use case
We recently launched our Community Business Blueprint course to help Circle customers build a strong foundation for their own community businesses. The course is video-based, but we include a brief text write-up with each lesson to give students an idea of what to expect in that lesson and reinforce key concepts.
We hadn’t yet launched our first few Community AI features when we drafted the write-ups, so we weren’t able to enlist the help of co-pilot, a feature that helps you write, edit, and repurpose content. But now that we have rolled out these features, we decided to revisit the write-ups and see if co-pilot might be able to get the job done more efficiently next time around.
How we used co-pilot
To test it out, we selected one lesson to use for the purposes of this experiment: A brief, minute-long lesson that introduces Module 5 of the course and provides an overview of what the next few lessons in the module will cover.
First, we copied the automated transcription of that lesson. Then, we fed co-pilot the prompt: “The following is a transcript from a course lesson. Draft a description of the lesson from the transcript: *I COPIED & PASTED THE TRANSCRIPT HERE*” and pasted in the transcription we’d copied from the course.
From this prompt, co-pilot came up with the following:
Welcome to Module 5 on the inner workings of successful communities! My name is Emma, and I manage community education at Circle. I’m thrilled to have you here with me for this module, where we’ll be making some key decisions about your community offering.
In this module, we have some exciting things planned. Let’s take a look at what we’ll cover:
- Establishing your programming strategy: We’ll kick things off by helping you define your programming strategy. This will involve selecting a few different rituals that will form the core of your community offering.
- Mapping out your community structure: Next, we’ll delve into community structure. Together, we’ll decide what spaces to include in your community and how to organize them effectively.
- Exploring engagement: Engagement is crucial for the success of any community. We’ll explore various ideas and strategies to kick start engagement in the early days of your community.
- Building community the sustainable way: Finally, we’ll wrap up the module by discussing how to build a sustainable community. We’ll cover important aspects such as fostering long-term engagement, managing growth, and ensuring the longevity of your community.
It was a noticeable improvement from the quick write-up that was initially created for the lesson, which you can see here:
In this module, Emma explores the inner workings of successful communities and helps you make important decisions about your community offering.
In Module 5, you’ll learn…
- How to establish your programming strategy
- How to map out your community’s structure
- How to kickstart engagement in a new community
- How to build community the sustainable way
While we’d definitely make tweaks to co-pilot’s version if we were actually using it, however, the way co-pilot summarized the main idea of each lesson and provided the additional context for each made for a great starting point. We loved how it bolded the most important text to emphasize the subject of each lesson in the module. We felt confident that the description generated by co-pilot would be usable for that specific lesson in the course.
But why stop there? We wanted to see what else we could do with co-pilot, so we continued with this prompt: “Shorten the lesson description above into one paragraph.” Ever the helpful assistant, co-pilot came back with this:
Welcome to Module 5 on the inner workings of successful communities! In this module, we will cover key decisions about your community offering. We’ll start by helping you define your programming strategy, selecting rituals that will form the core of your community. Next, we’ll delve into community structure, deciding what spaces to include and how to organize them effectively. We’ll also explore ideas and strategies to kick start engagement in the early days of your community. Finally, we’ll discuss how to build a sustainable community, focusing on fostering long-term engagement, managing growth, and ensuring longevity.
The impact
Using automated transcriptions and co-pilot together allowed us to create a strong, detailed lesson description in absolutely no time. You can see that co-pilot’s summary is more detailed than what I wrote on my own, so I can simply swap out what I had with co-pilot’s version. Having this detailed write-up for the lesson is great because everyone learns in different ways, and for some it’s easier to follow along with text than it is to pay attention to a video.
Co-pilot’s shortened version of the description is also really helpful. If we wanted, we could create these short summaries for each module in the course and then use them to promote the course in the community—they’d be really valuable in giving members a quick overview of the entire course.
Steal the prompt
If you’re also looking to generate summaries of video transcripts, feel free to use the prompt(s) below with co-pilot.
Ask co-pilot to create a summary of a video transcript:
The following is a transcript of [ _________ ]. Draft a description of the [ _________ ] from the transcript: *PASTE THE TRANSCRIPT HERE*
Ask co-pilot to shorten the summary:
Shorten the [ _________ ] description above into one paragraph.
Curious how else you can use this prompt (or one similar) to achieve a different outcome? Here are some ideas!
- Create a quick write-up of a past event. If you host frequent events in your community but spend too much time drafting write-ups to go along with the event replays, ask co-pilot to do it instead!
- Create a quick write-up to accompany a video tutorial. If you create video tutorials for your members, it’s a great idea to share the steps in text form as well! Ask co-pilot to create a text write-up to accompany your tutorial.
- Use the shortened description in marketing copy. Ask co-pilot to shorten the description for any of the use cases above, and then use what it comes up with in marketing copy (email, social, even within your own community) to promote the content.
