Parcourse

Turn curiosity into knowledge.

Parcourse turns a YouTube video into a course you can actually study: structured sections, questions that test your thinking, and a knowledge graph that maps how your understanding grows. It is self-hosted, and it runs on whichever model you bring.

Best with tutorials, lectures and explainers.

How courses flow
Paste a link
Study with modules
Write as you watch
Keep the cheatsheet
Answer the questions
See where you stand
Share the card
Watch the graph grow
One field Any YouTube link goes in here. There is no catalogue to browse and nothing to pick from.
Your notebook Finance, arts, history, whatever you were curious about. Every course here is one you made.
Smart sections Split from the transcript, each with the timestamp it starts at and its own questions.
It stops at the boundary When a section ends, the video pauses and a strip appears under it, offering the questions.
A drawer, not a page The sheet slides over the course from the edge. The video never stops for it.
Markdown, autosaved Previewed live as you type. Valid tokens stay where you put them and fade, and the sheet saves itself.
Take it with you Drawn in the browser and saved as a PNG or a PDF. Long courses run onto a second page.
The whole course Written after the sections are set, from the same transcript, one point per thing worth keeping.
Nothing is graded yet Choosing an option only records it. The quiz is marked when you submit the whole thing.
Writing counts too Written answers are marked alongside the multiple choice ones, on accuracy, completeness and relevance.
Marked, then explained Every answer gets a verdict and a reason, and the written ones get a score out of five.
Share the card Share result draws a card of the score and hands it to your phone's share sheet.
Drawn, not screenshotted The card is painted in the browser at full size, on the same paper and the same green.
Then it is the phone's job The file goes to whatever share sheet the phone has. On a desktop it simply saves.
Three depths Fields, topics or skills. The same graph, drawn at whichever grain you want to read it.
Mastery rolls up A parent is only as mastered as its weakest child, so nothing looks finished before it is.

Most links just work.

A few things can happen on the way in, and each one is a screen you actually see rather than a footnote. Keep scrolling to walk through them.

On the way in
The creator wrote chapters
It might not be a lesson
There is no transcript
You are not the only one
It works with chapters If the creator already divided the video, you can keep their divisions or have new ones written.
It checks first The transcript is read before any course is written. If there is little in it to learn from, it says so and asks.
Your call, always It is a warning, not a wall. Proceed Anyway carries on and builds the course regardless.
Only when it fails Without captions there is nothing to read. This is the one case with nothing to decide, so it just stops.
Teacher, parent or manager? Be the admin. Invite the people you are teaching and open any one of their graphs.
Still their notebook You can see what they have learned. You still cannot pick it for them.

It is already where you are.

The extension notices the video in the tab you are already on, and one click starts the course in your own Parcourse.

It will never tell you what to learn next

There is no feed.

No recommendations, no infinite scroll, no deluge of content. It is all about curation, and you are the curator.

There is no catalogue.

Nobody has decided what a beginner ought to cover first, because nobody here has been told they are a beginner.

There is nothing to keep up.

No streak to break, no daily goal, no badge quietly turning the thing you were curious about into a chore.

There is no one to beat.

Your graph is not ranked against anybody. Even the admin who invited you only sees what you have learned, never a ranking with you in it.

There is only what you were curious about.

Every course in a notebook is there because someone went and found it. That is the whole mechanism.

Attribution

A video belongs to whoever made it.

Parcourse does not host, mirror or re-upload anything, and it claims none of it. The video plays from YouTube in YouTube's own player, so watching it inside a course is watching it on YouTube, and the course around it is written from the transcript that already came with it.

So if a video taught you something, go and subscribe to the person who made it, and support them with likes, comments and, if possible, direct donations, or however else they have asked to be supported. All Parcourse does is help you retain and understand what they taught you.

Bring your own key.

Paste a key from whichever provider you already pay, and every course you generate is a call you made on your own account, at your own rate. Anything LiteLLM reaches works, and the form adapts to the fields it needs, from a single API key to a local Ollama URL or three AWS fields. Keys are stored encrypted, and any account can override the instance admin's default with its own.

*OpenRouterOne key, most models
AnthropicClaude
OpenAIGPT
GeminiGoogle
GroqFast inference
BedrockThree AWS fields
OllamaLocal, no key
Anything elseIf LiteLLM reaches it

Two commands, then it is yours.

Both halves are published as container images, so nothing builds locally. The database is versioned with Alembic and migrates itself on start. Use the bundled Postgres or point it at one you already have, Supabase and Neon included.

# nothing builds locally
cp .env.example .env
docker compose -f docker-compose.ghcr.yml up -d

app on :5173 · api on :8000
# first visit sets up the admin account

The rest of it.

Search that reads the course

A half-remembered phrase from a takeaway or a question finds the course it came from.

Regenerate with feedback

Ask again, and say what was wrong the first time.

Quiz history

Every attempt kept with the feedback that came with it.

More than one of you

The admin invites, sets a system model, and each account can override it.

Encrypted at rest

Provider keys are encrypted with a key you generate yourself.

Light and dark

Every colour is a token holding both values, so the whole app switches at once.

Documented properly

Every setting it reads, and every deployment shape, on a docs site of its own.

Open source

AGPL-3.0. Run it, change it, and share your changes if you offer it to others.

Run it yourself, or wait for the hosted one.

Self-hosting is the whole product. It is free, and it always will be. If you would rather not run it yourself, leave an address and hear about the hosted version once it launches. I assure you it will be just enough and not a penny more.

One email, when it opens. Nothing else, ever.