For Instructional Designers ·
What you'll accomplish
By the end of this guide, you'll be able to paste an entire SME content dump — a 100-page policy manual, a 60-slide deck, a transcript of a 2-hour SME recording — into Claude Pro and get a structured course outline, learning objectives, and narration draft back within minutes. No more summarizing your own notes at the end of a five-hour discovery process.
What you'll need
Go to claude.ai → click Upgrade to Pro → enter payment information → confirm your subscription.
What you should see: Your Claude dashboard with a conversation interface. Pro accounts have a significantly larger context window (100K+ tokens — roughly 75,000 words of input). Troubleshooting: If you see "message limit" warnings, you're still on the free tier. Verify your subscription completed.
Click New Chat → you'll see a clean conversation interface with a text input box at the bottom.
What you should see: An empty conversation ready for your first message.
Before pasting SME content, tell Claude what you're doing and what you need:
Type or paste:
"I'm an instructional designer working on a course for [target audience] on [topic]. I'm going to paste a large amount of raw SME content below. After I paste it, I'll ask you to help me analyze it. Don't respond yet — just let me know when you're ready."
Click Send → Claude responds acknowledging it's ready.
What you should see: Claude's brief response confirming it's waiting for the content.
In the next message, type "Here is the SME content:" then paste all of your content. This can be:
Click Send.
What you should see: Claude acknowledges it has received the content (it may also begin noting key themes). Troubleshooting: If Claude says the content is too long, break it into two or three messages.
In your next message, ask for what you need:
"Based on this content, create a course outline for a 45-minute eLearning module with 3 sections. For each section: write a section title, 2 learning objectives using Bloom's application-level verbs, and a list of the key topics to cover. Sequence the sections in the order that best supports learning for a [audience description] with no prior knowledge of this topic."
What you should see: A structured outline with modules, objectives, and topic lists — all derived from the actual SME content, not invented.
In the same conversation, follow up:
"Now write a narration script for Section 1. Audience: [description]. Reading level: 8th grade. Second person, present tense. Based only on the SME content I provided — do not add information from outside sources."
What you should see: A complete narration draft for the first module section, ready to drop into your storyboard template.
"Based on the Section 1 content, write 8 multiple-choice quiz questions at the application level of Bloom's Taxonomy. For each question: 4 answer choices, indicate the correct answer, write one sentence of feedback for each wrong answer."
What you should see: 8 complete quiz items with distractors and feedback.
Analyze a content dump and identify gaps:
Based on the content I provided, what important information appears to be missing for a [audience] audience trying to learn [topic]? List gaps I should ask the SME to fill in.
Translate jargon to plain language:
Identify the 10 most technical or jargon-heavy terms in the content I provided. For each, write a plain-language definition appropriate for [audience description].
Generate scenario ideas from real content:
Based on this content, write 3 realistic scenario situations that [job role] would face in their daily work, where applying knowledge of [topic] correctly would matter. These will become branching scenarios in the course.
Summarize a long SME recording transcript:
Summarize this transcript by topic area. For each topic: what the SME said, any specific examples they gave, and any follow-up questions I should ask to fill in gaps.