What are the main milestones (both skills and knowledge areas) that students need to pass to be able to complete this project? You don’t need to get too specific and there is no set number of milestones. You know your topic better than anyone else, so if you feel that that’s 20 separate milestones, that’s totally fine. If you think it might be closer to 10, not a problem either.
Oftentimes when you’re figuring out the milestones, you’ll find yourself working backwards from the end. That’s fine, but once you’re done, list the milestones in the sequential order in which you think they should be covered.
Now change milestones to units. Congratulations! You’ve just broken your large topic into much more manageable units.
Here are the sample Milestones/Units in our Ruby on Rails Curriculum:
| Section | Topic |
|---|---|
| 1 | Intro to Rails and What it Is |
| 2 | Rails Models Basics |
| 3 | REST |
| 4 | ActionView |
| 5 | CRUD with Rails |
| 6 | Validations and Forms |
| 7 | Associations and Rails |
| 8 | Refactoring with Partials |
| 9 | Refactoring with Helpers and Private Methods |
| 10 | Routes and Resources |
| 11 | Authentication |
| 12 | Asset Pipeline |
| 13 | Popular Gems |
| 14 | Consuming APIs |
| 15 | Building APIs |
And there you go! Now you have a solid high level outline of your course. This will go through several iterations. You might in your process, learn that a unit needs to be broken down even further or that there were missing units and lessons you hadn’t considered. That’s totally fine and expected!
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