6.8: Recap and Resources | Build Your Best Course

🎓 Module 06: Lessons

Here’s what you learned:

We’re talking (at a high level) about platforms now because when designing your course structure it’s useful to know how platforms organise content.
Platforms typically use this model: a course has multiple modules, a module has multiple lessons and a lesson can have multiple files.
However, it’s up to you how you use those “container” for your content (but if you use them in an unintuitive way it may be confusing for your students).

You learned that just as many songs can be created with just four chords, many courses can be created with just four content building blocks:

Lessons help students gain knowledge, e.g., learn a new concept, learn how something works, learn how to do something, or adopt a new belief.
Exercises help students learn through practice to develop physical, mental, creative or intuitive skills.
Assignments help students make tangible progress towards their result, and usually have a clear outcome or output. Examples include: completing a task, following a process, making a decision or scheduling future behaviour.
Resources make the other building blocks either easier or faster. Examples include: checklists, templates, demos, tools, etc.

Here’s what you learned:

A blueprint is like an architectural plan for your course, showing modules, lessons, assignments and so on. (It’s actually more detailed than a typical curriculum, which is why it has a separate name.)
The blueprint is really an evolved version of your cascade, and breaks the learning and doing chunks of work into lower-level building blocks.
Creating a blueprint also helps you to: see the “size and shape” of your course, validate your course, and market your course.

Here’s what you learned:

The average size of your lessons and assignments (i.e., your course’s granularity) will affect how your content breaks down.
The granularity of your course is determined by: what’s best for your students, what best for your result, and what’s best for you.
Consistency is important, so it’s good to set some limits or norms for the length of your lessons, exercises and assignments.

You learned there are four basic steps for turning your cascade into a blueprint:

Step 1 is adding lessons and assignments based on the learning and doing chunks of work in the cascade.
Step 2 is adding exercises to help cement a lesson or prepare students to complete an assignment.
Step 3 is adding resources to make the lessons, assignments or exercises easier or faster.
Step 4 is deciding how everything divides into modules.

Here’s what you learned:

One place you can usefully add an exercise is immediately after a lesson to help students deepen their understanding by putting the theory into practice.
The other place is immediately before an assignment, to help students develop skills they’ll need to complete that assignment successfully.
Resources can be attached to any lesson, exercise or assignment where they would be helpful.

Here’s what you learned:

The 4-step process for finalising your blueprint is: renaming, reordering, balancing, and flattening.
A balanced blueprint has a fairly even distribution of lessons and assignments and so on across the different modules. (Although a “bell curve” structure which starts and ends with easier modules is even better.)
The three “special moves” for balancing things out are: splitting a larger module into two or more smaller ones, combining smaller modules into a larger one, and migrating building blocks between modules.

Revisit your cascade and convert the chunks of doing and learning work into lessons, exercises, assignments and resources.

Finalise the structure of your blueprint by organising your lessons, assignments and resources into balanced and well-ordered modules.