🗣️ Transcript
Hello there! Well, we’ve come a long way. And we’re wrapping up this section of the course with a lesson called: Finalising Your Course Modules.
And here’s what you’ll learn:
- The 4-step process for finalising your blueprint
- What a balanced blueprint looks like
- 3 “special moves” for balancing things out
So let’s start by checking in to see where our blueprint is at right now.
At this point, it’s an enhanced version of your original cascade:
- We have the result at the top
- The essential achievements immediately underneath
- The LEARN and DO chunks for the work students need to do below those
- And at the bottom, the lower-level building blocks, like lessons and assignments, showing how everything breaks down into course assets
To draw a line under the course design process, your blueprint needs to look more like this:
- The result stays the top (or you can replace it with your course name if you have one)
- The next layer down has your course modules, arrange in their most effective order
- And underneath those are the lessons, assignments and so on from before
And here’s what the basic process looks like to get from one version of the blueprint to the other:
- Renaming achievements to modules (just as a starting point)
- Reordering the modules (if necessary) to make sure they’re in the most logical and effective order
- Balancing out the modules to avoid having some with lots of content and others with hardly any
- Flattening the blueprint by removing the LEARN and DO chunks, which we don’t need any more
So let’s look at that first step. What are we doing here?
Well, much of the time, the achievements in your original cascade can translate directly into your course modules.
It won’t always work perfectly, but it’s usually a good starting point, which means just renaming those achievements in your blueprint to modules.
The next step, reordering, is often not required if there’s a natural order to the achievements that’s already reflected in the new modules.
But now is your opportunity to make some changes to the order if you need to.
For example, if your first three modules don’t have a natural logical order, it’s a good idea to put the easiest one first to give people a gentle start to their learning experience.
And you could also swap two over if it improves the flow in some useful way.
Because here’s the thing. Taking a course is a necessarily linear experience.
So even if there’s some flexibility in the order that work can be done, it’s your job as the course designer to decide the order in which it’s actually done.
Quick side note. In rare cases, for instance where students work on the essential achievements in parallel, you’ll need a different approach. But I’ll talk about that outside of this main lesson.
The third step is balancing your blueprint.
A balanced blueprint has a fairly even distribution of lessons and assignments and so on across the different modules.
Of course, not every module will be exactly the same size, but if one module has two lessons and the next has twenty-two, that’ll look a bit weird!
I actually believe the courses that work best aren’t perfectly flat, they’re more like a shallow bell curve. So they start easy, have more work in the middle, and then get easier towards the end.
But we’re not trying to force some perfect distribution. I’m just saying it’s fine, even desirable, if the modules in the middle of your course are a bit more “meaty”.
So how do you achieve this state of balance?
Well there are three “special moves” you can use to change the size and shape of your course.
The first move is splitting a larger module into two or more smaller modules.
The second move is the opposite, combining two or more smaller modules into a larger one.
And the third move is migrating lower-level building blocks between modules.
Some combination of these moves should get you where you need to be.
With all of these moves though you’re not changing the overall order of the material, just how it’s distributed across your course modules.
And here’s a tip. Try to keep the LEARN and DO chunks intact to preserve the logical boundaries between different groups of lessons, and so on.
That’s why we’ve kept those extra bits of “scaffolding” around for this long. They’re also natural places to break off a new module if the current one is too big.
By the way, when you’re adding modules or changing their contents you’ll need to update the names or labels to reflect their new focus.
It’s also an opportunity to give your module names a bit more personality. Here are some quick examples using our hypothetical newsletter course.
Notice in particular how the “Create a 3-month content calendar” and “Write one month’s worth of content” achievements combine to become a single module called: “Plan and Fill Your Content Hopper”.
The final step in the process is flattening your blueprint.
And we do that by removing those LEARN and DO chunks from the hierarchy.
They’ve served their purpose so we can get rid of them.
Quick warning though. Whatever tool you’re using, just make sure you don’t accidentally delete any of the building blocks underneath them.
And when you’ve completed that you’re finished! And we’re finished with this module too.
Good luck creating your final blueprint and I’ll see you again soon.