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. Current supported tool flows process supported files and pasted review text in your browser: nothing is uploaded or stored on a server, and files and results stay in tab memory until you reset, close, or reload the tab. See the Privacy Policy and Trust notes for how data and hosting logs are handled.

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, no gatekeeping: no quota, no seat count, no subscription to cancel. CourseKit is hosted, so it can still break or go offline; the Terms of Use make no uptime promise. 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
✓Processed in your browser, with nothing uploaded or stored on a server: files and results stay in tab memory until you reset, close, or reload

The Toolset

Alt-Scan: Accessibility Scanning

Open Word, PowerPoint, Excel, or PDF files and get a plain list of what to fix: images with no alt text (slide by slide, sheet by sheet), Office's automatic alt text, slides without a title, and Word files without headings. PDFs get tagged-structure checks and a check for pages with no text, and anything the tags cannot confirm is left for you to check by hand rather than reported as a finding. Very large files get a bounded review, and the report says so.

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 turns it into one pass per file.

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: a Canvas quiz import (QTI .zip), Respondus Standard Format, or an 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 exports include a Canvas quiz import (QTI .zip), Respondus Standard Format, and Akindi-ready text and DOCX files, with the same in-browser editing before download.

Course Analyzer: Canvas Course Review

Choose a Canvas course export (.imscc) and get a clear read of what's inside: the evidence for each of the 44 QM standards, accessibility issues in pages and files, a draft alignment map, and the course structure. Nothing leaves your browser.

If you've ever tried to review 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: course handoffs, workload distribution checks, design-review prep, and pre-review analysis.

Measurable Objectives Checker

Added since this post. Paste course or module objectives and see which ones start with a vague verb (understand, know, learn), what to use instead, and the Bloom's level each measurable verb usually signals.

What's Next

This toolset is 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 Course Analyzer. Choose a Canvas course export and get a faster first read on structure, accessibility, and review prep before you dig through the course by hand.