6.5: Getting from Cascade to Blueprint

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🗣️ Transcript

Hello and welcome to this latest lesson, which is called: Getting from Cascade to Blueprint.

So here’s what you’ll learn:

Let’s start with a quick recap to make sure the major concepts are still clear in your mind.

Your cascade is a three level structure showing the major chunks of doing and learning work, organised under the essential achievements required to get the result.

Your blueprint is an enhanced version of your cascade showing how all the work turns into those four building blocks: lessons, exercises, assignments and resources. It also organises everything into modules.

Exactly how many building blocks you end up with, particularly the lessons and assignments, depends on the granularity of your course.

So here’s an overview of the whole process, before we go into more detail on each step.

The first step is working through your cascade, achievement by achievement, and deciding how each learning and doing chunk translates into appropriately sized lessons and assignments.

The second step is reviewing the lessons and assignments, and considering what exercises you could add to either cement the learning from a lesson or better prepare students to complete an assignment.

The third step is reviewing the lessons, assignments and exercises and considering if there are any resources you could add to make things either easier or faster.

And the fourth and final step is “flattening” your blueprint before turning your attention to how everything divides into modules.

Let’s start with the first step: adding lessons and assignments, and see how it works in practice.

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

Here are the top two layers of the cascade showing the main result and the essential achievements, which are:

Now, we’re not going to step through every achievement – that would take too long. So just let’s focus on the second one.

Imagine that the work behind creating a 3-month content calendar has been broken down into the following LEARN and DO chunks:

(For the sake of this example, let’s assume we’ve decided our average lesson will represent 5-10 minutes of study and the average assignment should take no longer than half an hour.)

The first chunk is “LEARN: What subtopics are and how to choose them” and I think we could cover that off in a single lesson.

I’m going to add a lesson called: “How to choose your subtopics”

Now in this instance, there’s a one-to-one correlation between LEARNs and LESSONs. And that can often happen by the way.

It could be that you’re already naturally thinking in lesson-sized chunks. Or it could just be a convenient coincidence. Either way, one “learn” chunk ends up as one lesson.

But as we go on, you’ll see that things diverge more when we have multiple lessons per chunk.

The next chunk is a DO chunk: “Make a list of your newsletter subtopics”.

It seems to me like this could be a single assignment, so I’ll just add “ASSIGNMENT: Brainstorm your subtopics and pick 5 - 10.”

Moving to the next chunk, called: “LEARN: How to generate enough newsletter ideas”, this one’s a little different because I think we’ll need more than one lesson.

In fact, let’s say I want to teach two separate approaches to generating newsletter ideas.

The first is to look at each subtopic from various different angles. But I also want to talk about how to use AI to generate ideas, which is enough of a self-contained topic to cover in a separate lesson.

So I’m going to add two lessons:

By the way, that’s another good reason to create separate lessons – when there’s a clear change of topic. It’s not just about hitting that target lesson size, it’s about breaking things up logically. And if that means some lessons are shorter than others, that’s just fine.

Moving to the next chunk, this one’s called: LEARN: How to write great email subject lines.

It’s a pure learning chunk – we’re not writing any real subject lines just yet.

In a later step we may add an exercise to help students get some practice with subject lines, but for now I’ll just add a single lesson called: What makes a subject line great?

The final chunk under this achievement is: DO: Add three months of newsletter ideas to a content calendar.

And let’s say I decide this needs two assignments because getting everything done within my target maximum of 30 minutes would be a tall order for most students.

So I add:

But then I happen to remember that there are good tools out there to help people manage their content calendars. And while I could just list them out in a resource later on, I decide they’re so useful that they deserve a bit more prominence in my course.

In fact I’m kicking myself for not including them in the initial cascade.

So I decide to add a brand new lesson, called: 3 great tools for managing your content calendar.

Now, it’s not very common to create a lesson under a DO chunk like this, but it’s the nature of this process that your thinking will evolve as you go through the steps.

Okay, that’s Step 1 in the wider process. I’m going to pause things here and pick it up in the next lesson.

In fact, by pausing here I’m doing exactly what we discussed earlier. I’m breaking a chunk of learning into more than one lesson to stay within the limits and norms that I’ve set for myself.

See you in the next lesson.