Prerequisites
Before you begin, make sure you have:- A Courser account (sign up at chatcourser.com)
- At least one YouTube lecture video URL
- (Optional) Your own OpenAI API key for higher usage limits
Create your chatbot
Sign in to Courser
Go to chatcourser.com and sign in with your Google account or email/password.
Only professors need a Courser account. Students can use the chatbot via a public link without signing in.
Create a new chatbot
From your dashboard, click Create Chatbot. Give your chatbot a name — for example, “BIOL 201 Assistant”.
Add your lecture videos
Paste one or more YouTube URLs for your lecture recordings. Courser accepts standard YouTube watch URLs:Click Create to start processing. Courser will:
Videos must have English captions enabled on YouTube. Auto-generated captions work fine.
- Fetch captions for each video
- Chunk the transcripts into searchable segments
- Generate embeddings and store them in the vector database
Test your chatbot
Once processing is complete, you’ll be redirected to your chatbot’s admin page. Click Open Chat to open the public chatbot interface and ask a test question based on your lecture content.You should see:
- A direct answer generated from the lecture material
- Cited sources with clickable links that jump to the exact timestamp in the video
Share with your students
Copy the public chatbot URL from your dashboard and share it with your students. You can:
- Post the link on Canvas, Blackboard, or any LMS
- Embed it in a course website using an
<iframe> - Share the direct link via email or syllabus
What’s next?
Customize your chatbot
Change colors, background image, instructions, and more
Managing courses
View, update, and organize your chatbots
Embedding the chatbot
Add your chatbot to Canvas or any website
Understanding citations
Learn how students can use cited sources