SLAN Building Blocks
How Courses, Frameworks, Thinking Paths, and Assistants fit together.
SLAN captures your expertise and turns it into AI that teaches the way you would. You upload your materials, encode your reasoning into frameworks, sequence them into guided paths, and deploy assistants that walk learners through real decisions.
The Four Blocks
Course
The starting point. A course is the container that holds everything: your files, frameworks, thinking paths, and assistants. Create one before you do anything else.
Upload your PDFs, slides, lecture notes, case studies, and reference material. These become the knowledge base your AI draws from. Every answer your assistant gives traces back to something you uploaded.
Framework
A framework encodes how you think through a specific decision. You define the inputs (what information is needed), the reasoning steps (how to work through the problem), and the outputs (what the learner produces).
Examples: evaluating a business model, scoring vendors against criteria, diagnosing why a metric dropped, running a build-vs-buy analysis.
Frameworks live inside a course. Use them when you want learners applying structured reasoning instead of getting open-ended answers.
Thinking Path
A thinking path sequences multiple frameworks into a guided, step-by-step workflow. Each step can apply a framework, pose a question, or deliver content.
Example: an onboarding path that walks new cohort members through three frameworks in order, where each output feeds the next step.
Use thinking paths when the order matters and each step builds on the last.
Assistant
The interface your learners interact with. Three configuration types:
| Type | What it does |
|---|---|
| Nudge | Guided, step-by-step thinking. Follows a Thinking Path. The assistant walks learners through clear steps, tradeoffs, and reasoning, building understanding as they go. |
| Structured | You fill in discrete fields: Task, Global Context, Rules, Steps, Examples. SLAN assembles them into a consistent assistant. |
| Prompt | You write the entire system prompt yourself. Full control over how the assistant behaves and responds. |
Every assistant is grounded in your course. It draws from your files, applies your frameworks, and follows your Thinking Path logic.
Distributing to Learners
Once your assistant is built, you need a way to get it in front of learners.
A Cohort is a group of learners with access to your course. You create a cohort, set it to public, restricted (registration code), or private, and share the link. Learners join the cohort and get access to the assistants you assigned.
A Widget lets you embed your assistant directly into an external site, LMS, or platform. You grab the embed code and drop it wherever your learners already are.