Why I built Pedagrade

I've spent fifteen years as an instructional designer. In that time I've built, reviewed, and rescued a lot of courses, and I kept running into the same thing.

Most courses are built content-first. You gather the material, lay it out slide by slide, and then, near the end, you bolt an assessment onto it. It feels productive. But it quietly skips the part that actually makes a course work: deciding what the learner should be able to do, and making sure every objective, every activity, and every quiz question lines up behind that.

This isn't a niche problem. It's in the overwhelming majority of courses I see. Objectives that can't be measured. Quizzes that test recall of a definition instead of the skill the course was supposed to teach. Walls of text where a diagram belonged. A missing transcript. None of it is anyone's fault. It's what happens when a deadline is bearing down and there's no one to give the work a second, rigorous look.

Why the existing tools don't catch it

Authoring tools only look at content built inside them. Accessibility scanners see WCAG but nothing about the teaching. A consultant will do a real review, but that costs thousands and takes weeks. And the new wave of "AI course checkers" mostly runs your confidential material through someone else's model and hands back generic advice.

There was no fast, private, rigorous way to take a course you already have and ask a simple question: is this actually built well, on the science of how people learn?

So I built the second set of eyes I always wanted

Pedagrade is that. You paste a course, and it reviews the instructional design against the established frameworks, scores it, and, for every issue, cites the principle it's drawing on and writes the fix for you. Then, if you want, it applies the fixes you approve and hands back a revised draft. It runs on its own private AI, on hardware I control, so your content is never sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, or anyone else, and it's never used to train anything.

It started as the tool I used to double-check my own work under deadline. It turned out useful enough that I cleaned it up and made it available to every other ID and L&D team who could use the same second opinion.

Yes, it's a one-person show. That's the point.

Pedagrade is built and run by one instructional designer, not a faceless startup bolting AI onto a demo. That means the rubric behind it is a practitioner's calibrated judgment, not a black box, and it means you have a direct line to the person building it. Tell me what it misses and I'll fix it. Tell me what your team needs and I'll build toward it.

There's clearly a need here. My job now is to earn your trust by getting it right, and to keep making it better.

Thanks for reading,
Todd K. Edwards
Instructional designer · builder of Pedagrade