[A01] Add course assets to your cascade

📋 Instructions

You’ll revisit your cascade and convert the chunks of doing and learning work into lessons, exercises, assignments and resources.

This means looking at each LEARN and DO chunk in turn and deciding which of these assets will be required.

First though, you’ll decide how big you want your final lessons and assignments to be, which will determine the granularity of your course.

Note: This is one of the harder assignments in this programme, so be sure to read the instructions carefully.

👣 Steps

To complete this assignment:

1. Decide on the “target size” for the lessons and assignments in your course:
   1. For your lessons, decide how much time the average student will need to spend on each one, e.g., 5 - 10 minutes.
   2. For your assignments, decide how much time the average student will need to complete each one, e.g., 15 - 60 minutes.
2. Next, taking each Achievement in your cascade in turn, review the chunks of work underneath and do the following:
   1. For each LEARN chunk, add one or more lessons underneath to cover what students will need to learn (you can use the prefix “LESSON”).
   2. For each DO chunk, add one or more assignments that cover what students will need to do (you can use the prefix “ASSIGNMENT”).
3. Now, looking at the lessons and assignments you’ve added:
   1. Where a lesson would benefit from a practical exercise to cement the learning, add one after the relevant lessons (you can use the prefix “EXERCISE”).
   2. Where an assignment would benefit from a practical exercise to prepare students completing it successfully, add one before the relevant assignments (again, you can use the prefix “EXERCISE”).
4. Finally, looking at each of the lessons, assignments and exercises you’ve added, consider whether the addition of a resource would make things easier or faster. If so, add one after (or as a child of) the relevant piece of course content.

---

👇 Example

Imagine a cascade for a course helping people to start an email newsletter for their business.

Following the steps described for this assignment above, here’s how the LEARN and DO chunks could be converted to lessons, assignments, exercises and resources:

• LEARN: What subtopics are and how to choose them
  • LESSON: How to choose your subtopics
• DO: Make a list of your newsletter subtopics
  • ASSIGNMENT: Brainstorm subtopics and pick 5 - 10.
• LEARN: How to generate enough newsletter ideas
  • LESSON: 7 angles to approach any subtopic
    • RESOURCE: “7 Angles” printable
  • LESSON: How to use AI for generating ideas
    • RESOURCE: List of AI prompts and examples
  • EXERCISE: Generate 10 ideas for an example subtopic
• LEARN: How to write great email subject lines
  • LESSON: What makes a subject line great?
    • RESOURCE: Examples of good and bad subject lines
  • EXERCISE: Practise writing subject lines
• DO: Add three months of newsletter ideas to a content calendar
  • ASSIGNMENT: Brainstorm 5 ideas per subtopic plus subject lines
  • LESSON: Three tools for managing your content calendar
    • RESOURCE: List of content calendar tools with links
  • ASSIGNMENT: Add your subject lines to your calendar

---

💡 Tips

Here are some tips for completing this assignment.

• When deciding how many lessons and assignments to break your chunks of work into, use the target sizes to guide you. (If you’re aiming to keep your lessons short and snappy, you’ll need more lessons to cover the same ground.)
• If a LEARN or DO chunk is too small to create a whole lesson or assignment around, try to roll it into an adjacent lesson or assignment and adjust its lessons or assignments accordingly. (This will mean removing the “too small” chunk from your cascade and adjusting the description of the “receiving” chunk to accommodate it.)
• Don’t go overboard when adding resources to your blueprint. Not every lesson, assignment or exercise needs a supporting resource. Add a few where they will have the most impact.
• At this stage it’s up to you whether you create “snappy” titles for your lessons and assignments, or just include simpler placeholder names
• Although you won’t typically add a lesson under a DO chunk, you may realise when adding assignments that some necessary piece of theory is missing, so feel free to add a lesson to fill any gaps.

Here are some further tips on sizing lessons and assignments:

• As a rough benchmark, five minutes of narrated video equates to around 750 words of spoken content and around 10 - 15 slides. The same content delivered as a text-based lesson might take around three minutes to read.