Introducing CourseKit: Free Tools Built for Working Instructional Designers

I Built These Because I Needed Them

Every tool in CourseKit started as a solution to something I was doing manually. Scanning course files for missing alt text. Reformatting question banks from faculty Word documents into something Respondus could actually import. Trying to visualize what a Canvas IMSCC export actually contains without clicking through every module.

These are not glamorous problems. Nobody's writing think pieces about them. But they eat hours every week, and they're exactly the kind of repetitive, mechanical work that should have a better solution.

So I built it. CourseKit is a free, independent toolkit for instructional designers, built from real frustration, for people doing real work.

Why Privacy Matters

CourseKit is browser-first, but not every tool works the same way. Course Analyzer and Alt-Scan run in the browser. Question Bank Formatter keeps pasted text local and uses temporary server-side parsing for uploaded PDF and DOCX files. File contents are not stored by CourseKit after processing.

This matters for a few reasons. First, privacy: course materials often contain student information, draft content, or institutional data you'd rather not send to a third-party server to be stored. Second, reliability: there's no rate limit, no downtime, no subscription to cancel. Third, simplicity: you open the page, you use the tool, you're done.

CourseKit is:

✓Free to use. No freemium tier, no upsells
✓No accounts required
✓Browser-first where possible, with no file contents stored after processing

The Three Tools

Alt-Scan: Accessibility Scanning

Upload PDF, DOCX, or PPTX files and get a report of every image missing alt text, including page or slide location, decorative-image detection, and tagged-PDF checks.

Before Alt-Scan, this meant opening every file, scrolling through every page, right-clicking every image, and logging findings in a spreadsheet. For a course with 40 documents, that's hours of work. Alt-Scan does it in seconds.

Reports export to PDF or Word, formatted for accessibility review documentation or just for your own workflow.

Question Bank Formatter: Respondus + Akindi Export

Paste or upload a question bank. The kind faculty send you in a Word document with inconsistent formatting, numbered differently every section, and maybe a few answer keys buried in the wrong place. Get back a clean export target for Respondus Standard Format or Akindi-ready upload.

Supports multiple choice, true/false, matching, short answer, and essay questions. Detects question types automatically. Includes an interactive editor so you can fix anything the parser misses before downloading.

The current export paths include Respondus Standard Format plus Akindi-ready text and DOCX outputs, with the same in-browser editing workflow before download.

Course Analyzer: IMSCC Analysis

Upload a Canvas IMSCC export and get a visual breakdown of what's inside: module structure, content types, workload distribution across weeks, accessibility checks, and QM-aligned readiness signals.

If you've ever tried to audit a course someone else built, or onboarded a new course section and needed to quickly understand what you're working with, Course Analyzer is for that. It gives you the bird's-eye view that Canvas doesn't surface on its own.

Useful for: QM prep reviews, course handoffs, workload distribution checks, and pre-review analysis.

What's Next

These three tools are the foundation. I have more on the list, things that came up during the same workflows that made me build these. The plan is to keep building what's actually useful, not what looks impressive in a demo.

If you use any of these tools and something doesn't work the way you'd expect, or you have an idea for what should exist, I'm genuinely interested. This isn't a product with a roadmap committee. It's one ID building tools for other IDs. Feedback lands directly with the person who can fix it.

Start with Alt-Scan. Upload any course document and see how it works. No account needed, takes about 30 seconds, and you'll immediately know if it's useful to you.