🗣️ Transcript
Hello there! And welcome to this next lesson which is called: What’s a Blueprint & Why Build One?
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- What do we mean by a blueprint?
- What’s its relationship with your cascade?
- 3 additional benefits of creating a blueprint
Let’s get into it.
I’ve laid the foundations for this module with the course anatomy lesson and the four content building blocks, but now it’s time to tackle this idea of a blueprint.
What is it exactly? After all, it’s in the module title, so it must be important.
Well, your blueprint is like a construction plan: it’s a specification for something to be built. But in this case it’s not a house or an office block, it’s your course.
Where a construction blueprint shows floors, rooms and other physical features, your course blueprint shows modules, lessons and other digital features.
In fact, your blueprint translates the doing and learning work described in your course cascade into those four building blocks we met in the last lesson: lessons, exercises, assignments and resources
It also uses modules to break all those blocks up into logical sections.
But how does this translation work in practice? How do you get from your cascade to your blueprint?
Don’t worry, there’s a whole lesson about the process, but you may already have some ideas about how it works.
For instance, you’ve probably guessed already that there’s a connection between the “learn” chunks in your cascade and the lessons you put in your curriculum.
After all, lessons are where the bulk of the learning happens.
Likewise, you’ve probably worked out that the “do” chunks in your cascade will influence the assignments you add.
After all, assignments are an obvious way to get people to do stuff.
Beyond that though, you might be unsure. What about exercises and resources? And what about modules?
Like I said, there’s a whole lesson on this coming up, but let’s look at a quick example to better understand the gap we need to bridge.
Imagine your course teaches students how to become freelance copywriters, and there’s an achievement in your cascade called:
“Master the fundamentals of copywriting”.
And under that achievement you have a chunk of work (among several others) called:
“LEARN: Three popular copywriting formulas”
And although the lower-level detail is not explicitly broken out in your cascade, you’ve decided that the formulas you want to teach are:
- The “Problem, Agitate, Solve” formula
- The “Features, Advantages, Benefits” formula
- The “Attention, Interest, Desire, Action” formula
So the question you’ll need to answer, which isn’t currently answered by your cascade, is:
“How does that chunk of learning actually break down inside your course?”
For instance, will it become a single lesson with three subtopics covering the three copywriting formulas, or three completely separate lessons with one lesson per formula?
Or if your course is very in-depth, will each formula need more than one lesson to do it justice?
It’s when building your blueprint that you’ll answer all of these types of questions:
- Which chunks of work will become lessons and how many?
- Which ones will become assignments, and how many?
- What additional exercises and resources will be required?
- How will everything divide up into modules?
By the time you’re done, your blueprint will tell you exactly what content you’ll need to create.
You can see why a blueprint is so essential!
And the benefits go beyond the obvious. In fact, there are three additional benefits I want to call out.
The first is that a blueprint lets you see the “size and shape” of your course.
Good course design isn’t just about stringing a bunch of lessons and assignments together. It’s about creating a student journey that seems logical, balanced and digestible.
Building a blueprint gives you a “helicopter view” of your course that lets you see the forest for the trees. You can easily see if one module is too large or too small or has too many tough assignments compared to other modules.
Then, if necessary, you can move things around and rebalance.
Secondly, a blueprint helps you validate your course before you build it.
Remember we talked in an earlier module about how people aren’t just interested in what your course will do for them but how it does it?
Well, your course blueprint is a detailed description of your “how”.
This is really valuable when it comes to validating your approach with your market, and by extension getting feedback on your entire course idea.
For instance, you can share your draft blueprint with a few friendly contacts within your target market and ask them for feedback.
If they tell you “Yes – I really need this!” then you know you’re onto something. If they’re lukewarm about it, that tells you something else altogether.
Finally, a blueprint supports your sales and marketing efforts.
That’s because before buying your course most people will expect to see some version of your curriculum, for example, displayed on your course’s sales page.
It’s particularly valuable when you’re launching a beta version where the content isn’t complete yet, or even when pre-selling your course, which means selling it before anything has been built.
Having a detailed blueprint will reassure people you have a clear plan for their journey, and you’re not just making it up as you go along.
Okay, that’s all for this lesson. Hopefully you can see that building a solid blueprint for your course is a no-brainer.
By the end of this module you’ll have converted your course cascade into a blueprint for a kick-ass curriculum that’ll underpin everything that follows.
See you in the next lesson!