Add and edit a course and its lessons¶
This is where the teaching content gets built: the courses, their chapters, and the lessons. You write them, organise them, and link them to three things: the standards they teach, the instructional routines that give lessons their structure, and the formatters that decide the layout. Once this content is in place, it feeds document generation.
Curators only
These edits go through the curator role and stay in a draft until published. Nothing reaches generation before it is published.
The "content" layer at a glance¶
Course → Chapter (grouping) → Lesson → Activities, materials
- A course is the root of a document — for example the pupil manual or the teacher's guide.
- A chapter (a grouping) gathers lessons; depending on the subject it may be called a chapter, a unit, or a week.
- A lesson is the unit of work: it is what you align to an objective and apply a routine to.
Create a course, a chapter, a lesson¶
Just describe what you want, and where:
"Create a chapter 26 'Decimal numbers' at the end of the pupil manual."
"Add a lesson 'Add two decimals' to chapter 26."
You can describe it all at once — Claude prepares the lot, shows the preview, and only writes after your confirmation:
"Create chapter 26 with three lessons: …, …, …"
Chapter numbers
To add or renumber, aim at a free number (add at the end, or fill a gap). To insert a chapter in the middle and shift the others, do it explicitly, step by step.
Edit and reorganise¶
| You want to… | Say something like… |
|---|---|
| Fix a title | "Rename chapter 3 to 'Decimal numbers'." |
| Edit a lesson's text | "Replace the content of this lesson with: …" |
| Move a lesson | "Move this lesson to chapter 6." |
| Reorder | "Put this lesson first in the chapter." |
| Delete | "Delete this lesson." (whatever depends on it is removed with it) |
Moving a lesson does not renumber everything in cascade: belonging to a chapter is a link, not a fixed number.
A lesson can have two homes
In mathematics, one lesson may belong both to a chapter (the content axis) and to a week (the schedule axis). This is intentional. Moving the lesson along one axis leaves the other intact — say which one you mean if there is any doubt.
Link a lesson to the standards¶
A lesson only makes full sense when linked to the objective it teaches. That is alignment, described in detail in Build standards and components:
"Align this lesson to the objective 'Compare two numbers up to 20'."
To check what a lesson teaches:
"Which objective is this lesson linked to, and which components does it cover?"
Apply an instructional routine to a lesson¶
A routine is a reusable teaching template — for example the five steps of a 30-minute lesson sheet. You apply it to a lesson to give it structure:
"Apply the 'Lesson sheet' routine to this lesson."
Applying a routine makes an independent copy attached to your lesson: later tweaks to the original routine do not change it. To create or edit the routines themselves, see Create instructional routines.
Create a document (manual, guide, revision sheet)¶
A document is what will actually be produced: a pupil's manual, a teacher's guide, a revision sheet. It is not the curriculum — it binds a piece of curriculum to a form.
You create one in a sentence, by saying what it must cover:
"Create a revision sheet for chapter 5."
"Create a pupil's manual for this course."
A document must always be attached to some content
This is the quietest failure in the system: a document that covers nothing raises no error — generation simply produces an empty document, and you find out at the end. That is why creating a document and attaching it to the curriculum happen in a single step: neither can exist without the other.
A document can then be split into sections, each attached to what it presents:
"Add a 'Chapter 1' section to this document, for chapter 1."
"Add a cover page at the start." (a section that covers nothing — normal for a cover or a table of contents)
Sections are the real unit of work: generation produces a document section by section. A long document is therefore worth splitting up.
Apply a formatter to a course¶
A formatter describes the layout of the produced document — palette, typography, page setup, illustration style. You apply it to the course (the root of the document), and generation follows it:
"Apply the 'House style' formatter to this course."
As with a routine, applying it creates an independent copy attached to the course. To create or edit formatters, see Create formatters.
Preview before publishing¶
Before handing over to the approver, you can see the result of your draft without publishing anything:
"Show me the pending changes." (the draft in detail)
"Preview the manual for this course from the draft." (the document it would produce)
The preview stays isolated: it writes nothing to the official space and does not appear in the list of produced documents. When you are happy with everything, move to Review, publish or discard a draft.