Your course sells.
But does it teach?
Most online courses are information products wearing a curriculum costume. Learners stall, completion rates sink, refund requests creep up. And now AI hands out information for free. We audit your course against real learning science and show you exactly how to fix it.
Book a Free Discovery CallPeople buy your course.
Then they quietly stop.
You know your subject inside out. Your audience trusts you. Your course sells. And yet, somewhere around module two or three, most of your students go quiet. The completion data is the stat you've stopped looking at. The community asks questions the course already answers. The occasional refund email says something polite about it being "a lot to take in."
None of that means your content is bad. It means your course is delivering information without doing the work of teaching: no real structure guiding learners from where they are to where they want to be, too much crammed into each lesson, no feedback telling students whether they're actually getting it, and nothing pulling them through to the finish.
That gap used to be survivable. It isn't anymore. AI can now hand anyone a competent summary of almost any topic in seconds, which means pure information has a market price of zero. What people will still pay for, what they'll pay more for, is a course that changes what they can do. Practice, feedback, structure, momentum. Actual teaching.
Fixing that isn't about recording more videos. It's about learning design. And that's a skill set almost nobody in the creator economy has.
My experience with The Podcast Host made my podcast launch possible. I overcame a lot of my fears early on.
The Course Effectiveness Audit:
from "why do they stop?" to a clear fix.
A fixed-fee, fixed-timescale review of your course or membership against learning science criteria. You get a scored report and a prioritised rebuild roadmap within 10 working days.
01 — Review
We go through your course as a learner and as a learning scientist
We work through your full course or membership the way a real student does, while assessing it against five criteria that determine whether learning actually happens: structure, cognitive load, feedback loops, completion drivers, and navigation.
02 — Score
You see exactly where learners are being lost
You get a scored report across all five criteria: what's genuinely working, where students stall, and why. Not vague impressions. Specific lessons, specific moments, specific causes, each tied to established learning science rather than opinion.
03 — Roadmap
You get a prioritised rebuild plan
The report ends with a rebuild roadmap ordered by impact: quick wins you can ship in a weekend, structural changes worth planning properly, and the interventions that would move completion the most. The roadmap is yours, and plenty of clients run it themselves.
04 — Rebuild or Build
If you want help, we do the work with you
Some clients hand us the roadmap and we rebuild the course together. Others want a specific learning intervention designed and built as a real tool inside their product. Both are scoped separately, and neither is required. The audit stands on its own.
Three ways we work with you.
Course Effectiveness Audit
The lead offer. A full review of your course or membership against learning science criteria, delivered as a scored report with a rebuild roadmap. Fixed fee, £1,500–£2,500 depending on course size, delivered in 10 working days. Priced so a solo creator can buy it on a card, no procurement dance required.
Course Rebuild
We take the roadmap and do the work with you: restructuring modules around real learning outcomes, cutting cognitive overload, designing practice and feedback into every section, and building the completion drivers that get students to the end. Scoped per engagement, typically £5k–£15k.
Learning Intervention Design & Build
Named, focused tools that do one teaching job brilliantly: a Title Clinic that workshops students' draft titles, a 4-Minute Feedback tool that reviews their work against your rubric. We design the intervention and build it as real software with Claude Code, turning the questions that clog your community into a promotable product feature. Scoped per tool.
What students say about
learning with us.
Every quote here comes from someone who took one of our courses or memberships. We've picked the ones that talk about the teaching itself: the pacing, the feedback, and whether they actually finished.
We'd like your students to be this effective, and this happy with what you built. That's what the audit is for.
The four-minute feedback is just a genius idea. You submit three to four minutes of audio and they critique it. You're given particular points of focus, and the feedback was invaluable in either letting me know I was off track or on track.
"I used the Podcast Host Academy material extensively, and it was just brilliant: comprehensive, relevant, targeted, useful and practical."
Mike Elder
Host, Where Your Treasure Is
This was just the right amount of information at the time that I needed it. Give us too much and I get lost. There was more I could check into if I still had a question, without getting overloaded. I'm now on episode 11, and that seemed impossible a couple of months ago.
Sabine O'Laughlin
Podcast Host Academy student
This is a great resource and helped me go from nothing to a published sneak peek episode, ready for the world, in one week. A podcast I dreamed of for several years is now live.
Big talker. Dreamer. Lots of ideas but no action.
Clear. Organized. Have a tangible plan.
Kris Hutchinson
Host, The Hallelujah Everybody Podcast
Colin is the man when it comes to helping you launch a podcast or improving your skills. The online courses were invaluable and his advice along the way superb.
Andrew Hart
Financial Advisor, The Voyantist
Learning science. Creator economics.
Here's the uncomfortable truth about the course improvement market: the people who understand learning science have mostly never sold a course, and the people who've sold courses have mostly never studied how people learn.
Academic learning designers can tell you about cognitive load theory, but they've never sweated a launch, watched a refund rate, or built a community around a product. Course-creator gurus can tell you about launches and funnels, but their teaching advice amounts to "add more value" and "make it engaging."
Corran Labs sits in the overlap. A PhD in online education, an award-winning record in course design, six years teaching at university level, and fifteen years building, selling, and eventually exiting a real education business (courses, memberships, and a SaaS product used by thousands of paying customers). We know what the research says about how people learn, and we know what it costs to apply it in a business that has to sell every month. That combination is what you're hiring.
We've studied this, taught this,
and built a business on it.
Corran Labs is led by Colin Gray, founder of The Podcast Host and Alitu.
Colin holds a PhD in online education and spent six years as a university lecturer, teaching and researching how people actually learn online, long before "course creator" was a job title. He's a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, the recognised standard for teaching practice in UK higher education, and in 2014 he won a MoodleMoot award for course design, for a programme he built at Edinburgh Napier University.
Then he went and did it commercially. Through The Podcast Host, Colin and his team built one of the world's leading education platforms in the podcasting space: online courses, a membership academy, a top 1% podcast, and a site reaching over 2 million visitors a year. Thousands of students went through those courses. Alongside it, he built Alitu, a SaaS tool that grew past $1M in annual revenue. Both businesses were acquired together in February 2026.
That means every recommendation in your audit has been tested from both sides: against the research, and against the reality of running an education business where completion, retention, and word of mouth pay the bills.
The short version: A doctorate in how people learn online, an award for designing courses that work, and fifteen years selling the results commercially. Nobody else in this market brings all three.
Sound familiar?
You're a course creator, membership owner, coach with a signature programme, or an education business. You're an expert who teaches what you do: a therapist training therapists, a photographer teaching photographers, a consultant packaging a methodology.
Your product sells, but something's off. Students ask questions in the community that module three already answers. Completion numbers make you wince. Testimonials praise you, but rarely describe a result. Refund emails use words like "overwhelming" and "couldn't keep up."
Or maybe you're doing well and want to get ahead of the shift: as AI makes raw information worthless, you want your course to be the thing AI can't replicate: structured practice, real feedback, and a path learners actually finish.
You don't need a bigger course. You almost certainly need a better-designed one. That's what we do.
Questions you might have.
A scored report reviewing your course against five learning science criteria (structure, cognitive load, feedback loops, completion drivers, and navigation), plus a rebuild roadmap prioritised by impact. Specific lessons, specific problems, specific fixes. Delivered within 10 working days of us getting access.
The Course Effectiveness Audit is a fixed fee between £1,500 and £2,500, depending on the size of your course or membership. You'll know the exact figure before you commit, and you can pay by card. Rebuild engagements are scoped separately, typically £5k–£15k, and intervention builds are scoped per tool.
All of them. Kajabi, Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, Circle, Skool, custom-built platforms. The learning science doesn't care where your course is hosted, and neither do we. If your students can access it, we can audit it.
No. The roadmap is written so you can act on it yourself, and plenty of creators do exactly that. If you'd rather we do the work with you, or you want a specific intervention designed and built, that's available, but the audit is a complete product on its own, not a teaser for an upsell.
A small, named tool that does one teaching job your course currently isn't doing. A Title Clinic that gives students structured feedback on their draft titles. A 4-Minute Feedback tool that reviews their work against your rubric before they post it in the community. We design the pedagogy and build the tool as real software, so the repetitive questions in your community become a feature you can put on your sales page.
Because "normal for the industry" is dreadful. Most online courses lose the majority of their students before the end. Completion is where results come from, and results are where testimonials, referrals, renewals, and premium pricing come from. As AI drives the price of pure information to zero, the courses that get people to the finish line are the ones that will keep charging real money.
Almost certainly the opposite. The most common problem we see is too much content, poorly structured. Courses built to feel comprehensive rather than to teach. Most rebuild roadmaps involve cutting, restructuring, and adding practice and feedback, not recording another module.
A well-designed course still needs an audience. If your teaching is solid but your reach isn't, our content strategy work helps you build the engine that fills your course with the right students.
Explore Content Strategy →The same thinking behind our learning intervention tools applies across your whole business. If you want AI working in your operations, marketing, and team workflows, take a look at our AI Implementation work.
Explore AI Implementation →Information is free now.
Teaching is what they'll pay for.
In 10 working days you'll know exactly why learners stall in your course and what to fix first: scored, prioritised, and grounded in real learning science. Book a free discovery call and we'll tell you the exact fixed fee for your course.