Why I built Pedagrade

I'm an instructional designer. I've built, reviewed, and rescued a lot of courses, my own included, 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, and it isn't about skill. In one study of 9,713 exam questions written by instructors with 3 to 36 years of experience, 93% tested only recall or basic understanding (Momsen et al., 2010). I see the same pattern in courses I review, and I've caught it in my own. 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 starts where the course should: with the objectives. It maps each one to where it's taught, practiced, and assessed, flags the gaps, then reviews the design against the established frameworks and, for every recommendation, cites the principle it's drawing on and writes the fix for you. You decide what to change. 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 Pedagrade never sends your content to any outside AI company, and never uses it 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.

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

Pedagrade is a product of Black Beacon Studios LLC, an Ohio company. You can reach me at todd@pedagrade.com. For help with your account, write to support@pedagrade.com.