This is the one state in the series where our answer about the course is mostly no, and it's the most useful answer on this page of the site.
Run the numbers the way the course ads won't. A typical North Carolina ticket carries roughly $3,735 of three-year insurance exposure as a ceiling estimate, one of the steeper bills in the country, and North Carolina mandates no insurance discount for completing any course. A $27.95 to $59 course, taken on its own initiative, prevents none of that exposure and removes nothing from an ordinary record. As a standalone purchase it returns approximately zero.
What's emphatically worth it is the thing the course sometimes rides along with: the court proceeding. A granted PJC can prevent the entire insurance consequence, a return that's effectively infinite against its price of showing up and asking, rationed at one per household every three years for insurance purposes. And where a prosecutor or judge trades a dismissal or reduction for a course, the course inherits the value of that deal, suddenly worth many multiples of its price because the court made it so. The DMV's point-reduction path, 7-plus points, $40 hearing, once every five years, is similarly worth it for exactly the drivers it's built for.
So the North Carolina rule: never buy the course first. Understand your courtroom options, then buy the course if and when it's the ticket to something.
The full strategy is on our points page; courses, when you need one, are compared on the North Carolina page.