Design Your Own Personal Curriculum

1. Intro: Hi, my name is Niche Snow, designer, productivity advocate and lifelong learner. Over the years, I've taught myself a wide range of skills from calligraphy and hand lettering to notion, podcasting and even punch needle, all without formal instruction. How? By creating my own personal curriculum. Lately, TikTok has rediscovered this idea. People are designing their own self study like semesters, choosing topics they're curious about and tracking their growth like students in their own school of life. I love this because I've always worked this way, and I want to show you how to do it too. In this class, you'll design a self study plan that feels doable, fun, and aligned with who you are right now. You'll finish with a personal curriculum you can use month after month, complete with a syllabus schedule, and ways to stay accountable. If you're ready to create your own learning path, download the resources, and let's get started. 2. 1.1 Brainstorm Your Interests : So brainstorming your interest is lesson one under creating your own self study plan. Every curriculum starts with curiosity. Take a minute to list everything you're drawn to specific topics, skills, hobbies or ideas that make you think, I'd love to learn this. Don't filter just stream of conscious. What are the things that pop into your head and just write them all down? Don't think about if it's useful or not, just write it down. And once you've done that, I also want you to look at maybe some of your social media accounts that might give you other ideas about what your interests are. For example, if you're on Pinters, take a look at your boards. What are you saving the most? If you are someone who has, like, very structured Pintrs boards, like, what are the name of those boards? Like, does that give you any insight into things that you are interested in? If you are on, for example, Instagram or Tik Tok. If you tend to save those posts, what types of posts are you saving? If you go into the saved post area of any of those social media sites, do you see a pattern or a trend of things that interest you the most? Think of this as your curiosity list. The goal here isn't to commit to anything yet. It's to see your interests laid out in one place. For example, I created my own list of interests by reviewing my reading list, the classes that I'm drawn to, the social media posts that I bookmarked. I looked at my Pintresbard. I looked at my saved bookmarks. I looked at the substack topics that I tend to be interested in the YouTube videos I tend to watch when I go into my watch list, I began to notice patterns that helped me quickly generate a list of recurring things. I also reflected on areas I haven't yet explored, but might want to add to my list. So your exercise for this session, jot down all those ideas either in your self study plan template that I've provided or in your journal. Whatever makes sense for you. Once you have that list created, take a few minutes to rank your list. Start by highlighting the topics that feel most exciting or meaningful right now. This quick ranking will help you identify which ideas require your attention first. Look at it like you're choosing your college electives for your creative life. Once you've done that, next is choosing your topic. 3. 1.2 Choose One Topic: Next step, choose one. Now that you have your curiosity list, I want you to look through it and we're about to simplify it. For this first round, I want you just to choose one topic to focus on for one month, 30 days. Keeping it to one will help you build momentum, stay consistent and actually finish what you start. You might be tempted to do two or three, but I highly suggest for this first go around, you just choose one to see how it goes. Once you've gone through a whole month of focused learning, you'll see how easy it is to scale this system. You can then, repeat this process for another month or even run multiple topics at once in future months or quarters depending on your energy and your goals. So the idea is to start small, learn deeply, and create a rhythm that fits your life. So for this session, look through your list, rank the list, and choose the one that you want to start with. Once you've chosen that one topic, we'll move on to creating some learning goals. 4. 1.3 Define How You Learn (Learning Goals): All right, the last lesson in Module one, define how you learn. One of the biggest mistakes we make is trying to learn the same way as everyone else. The truth is each of us processes information differently, and that's what makes self study powerful. You can design a method that actually works for your brain. I noticed that many of the people who started the personal curriculum trend came from what's called BokTok which is a community of TikTokers that discuss books, and they tended to build their self study around stacks of books that they were going to read for their specific topic. That's great for them, but it doesn't work for everyone. Personally, I need a mix of formats to fully absorb a topic. So we're talking podcasts, videos, articles, and hands on projects. But you may have a totally different learning style. But if you have downloaded the PDF that I provided in the resource section, one of the worksheets I have is a learning style self assessment. This self assessment has five different learning sections that ask you some questions to help you get an idea of what kind of learner you are. I also have a bonus reflection and environment box, so you can start thinking about what type of environment works best for you too. I'm hoping that this self assessment allows you to really think through your learning style. For example, if reading isn't your thing, lean in on audio books or video lessons. Sign me up. If you learn by doing, include many projects or experiments in your syllabus. If you love structure, making sure that you add your study session to your calendar. The key is to make the syllabus, your learning plan easy to begin and enjoyable to continue. So your exercise for this session in your template or wherever you're taking notes, make a short list of how you prefer to learn. It is your personal learning formula. This will guide your material choice and help you stay consistent. Once you've done that, let's begin Module two. 5. 2.1 Learning Materials : Alright, on to Module two, which is building your personal syllabus, the first lesson is curating your learning material. So let's build your learning program. Every class, even a self study one, needs good material. So I want you to keep your preferred learning style in mind as you begin to gather your content. So think of this as your shopping list for your brain. Here are a few categories to explore as you're curating your content. The first is books. Most people are going to have books in their curriculum. Regardless of what type of learner you are. And so if you choose to do that, remember, you can go with free options, paid options. You can go with physical options or digital options when it comes to books. When it comes to physical books, you can go to places like Thrift Books to get discount books. You can get digital books that you can pay for on Kindle and Apple Books. You can go to your local bookstore to get physical books. You can go to the library. And with the library, you can go to your local branch to get physical books, or you can connect your library card to apps like Libby and get digital versions of the books, either versions that you can read in apps like Kindle because it'll provide it through Libby for you to read it in Kindle, or you can do audio books. I do audio books all the time in Libby. So know that as you're building your list, there are multiple ways of obtaining books, and they can be free or paid in a style that works best for your brain. Also think about podcasts and YouTube videos. These are excellent free resources for auditory and visual learners. Other things to consider are documentaries, Ted Talks, newsletters and blog. So, for example, I keep all the AI newsletters that I receive in a folder that I plan to read later, and I want to put that into an AI curriculum that I plan to do later for my personal study. Last but not least, but not this is totally, you know, not the end of the types of content that you can use, but another type of content for consideration are like field trips, and these field trips could be to museums. You could go to free or paid workshops. You can go to just physically go to a coffee shop for a personal journaling session that you can bring where you can bring your learning to life. The point is, if you want to get outside the house and do something to help with your learning, that can be done in multiple ways, and it really just depends on the topic that you choose and kind of what you find or define as a field trip for your particular syllabus, your particular topic. So to guide your research, let's use a real example. Say, for example, you always wanted to write fiction, okay? But the idea of a full length novel feels overwhelming. So you might start by exploring different types of fictions, and maybe you land on the idea of writing a novela. And a novela is something in between a short story and a novel. So think of it as it's like typically around 20 to 49,000 words. So I'm using this specific example to help you think through the process of building a syllabus. So you decide on this novella, right? So from there, you could use targeted searches, like how to write a novella. Nove structure, Novella pacing, Novell word count 15 to 30,000 or 15 to 49,000. Or you can search things like NovelalaOline. And as the search results come up, you can click on the various links to see what appeals to you. You can also, let's say, if you were researching this topic, you can also mix in broader searches, like even just how to write fictions to round out your study. And as you're doing all of these searches, you should save articles, videos, or book recommendations that pop up and interest you. And you can always mix them later if they don't make the cut. So there's a lot of different ways to gather the information that you need as far as the materials that you need. And I suggest not just using a search engine like Google to find content, go onto YouTube and do searches. Go to some of your favorite bookstores and do searches of the content there. Go on to Red it or Substack. And I would say, as you're searching and you're gathering all of this content Pay attention to the ratings or the repeated recommendations because maybe you'll see on Google, YouTube, and Red it, everybody brings up the same book or everybody brings up the same workshop or same whatever. More than likely, it's something that you should probably add to your curriculum because people truly value that content. So as you do this research, gather your resources in one place, the syllabus template that I provided, or you could use your browser bookmarks. You can create a pinchers board. You can create a list in your Notes app. You can create a notion page. The point is, you need to have a structured way of gathering all of this content. Yes, you could write it down, but I highly suggest for this part, being able to have a digital way to capture it because a lot of things will be links, and you want to be able to easily get back to those links. So you can make it as complex, you know, or as easy as you want, as far as, like, how you gather this information. But just make sure that you have one central location where you're organizing all of your material. And then remember, you can make your curriculum as budget friendly or as deluxe as you like. It's your school, it's your rules. So I hope that example that I provided, like, on even like how to write a novella kind of helps you think through how you want to gather information for your particular topic, because guess what? That is the exercise for this session. Add the materials you find, as I mentioned before, to either the template I provided or however you have decided to organize your content. And remember, as you explore, the important thing is to collect everything just in one place. As I mentioned before, the browser bookmarks or the Pintrsbard, your Noeapp or the notion page, just keep the resources organized, ensure you can easily reference them when you start your study. And if this feels overwhelming, you can always see if someone else has already created a personal curriculum that they're sharing for free, because a lot of people online are sharing their curriculums. So you can do a search for personal curriculum syllabus for how to write a novella, how to start knitting on physics, you know, whatever you want, you know, you can search and see if maybe someone has already done the groundwork, and then from there, you can use it as it is, or you can then customize it a little bit more. I just want to make sure that for someone who doesn't feel comfortable doing deep searches on specific topics, I just want to make sure I can meet everyone where they are, and no one feels overwhelmed in this journey. And remember, there is no right or wrong way to do this. The point is that you just get through it. So after you have gathered all the material that you think you need for your syllabus, go on to the next section. 6. 2.2 Create Your Syllubus: Lesson two under Module two is creating the actual syllabus. We're almost there people. We are almost there, right? So remember, you are accomplishing this over a four week period. So we want to make sure that this is achievable. In this section, you are going to choose a title, write a course description, write learning outcomes, and decide on a goal, and you're going to organize this content over four weeks. I'm going to stick with the writing example used in the last session to walk you through how to do this. The course description and learning outcome sections are optional in your syllabus, but I highly recommend them. Begin to work on this syllabus. If you go into the Resource tab for this class, you'll see three PDFs. You'll see a printable PDF where you can print this form. Or you can use that PDF to open it in good notes and take notes and good notes. You'll see another PDF labeled forms, and it allows you to use Acrobat in order to, like, type into the different areas. And then a third PDF is the PDF that I'm showing you here where it's already filled out so you can get a sense of how you can use it for your project. If you go to page eight for course materials, you'll see this is where you can cut and paste in or write in depending if you printed this. The content that we talked about in the last lesson is just a good way of throwing in everything that you found, adding the URLs, maybe start to chunk out the information either by type or topic, just so you can see what you have. Start to organize it. For me, I kind of chunked everything by things that I want to watch, things I want to listen, things I want to read, and events. But you can do it however you want. The point is that you have all the content for consideration in one place, and you can start to organize it so you can then use it to create your syllabus. Next, you have the syllabus. The syllabus is three pages. The first page has the title, the duration, course description, learning outcomes and assessment. And the next two pages are week one through week four, and this is where you would start to organize your information. For the first page of the syllabus, I recommend giving your course a fun title that is relevant to what you're trying to learn. You put in the duration for this class. We're focusing on one month, but in the future, you might do a fall semester or summer semester. For the course description, keep it brief. Two sentences about what this course is about. The learning outcome, I suggest adding a few ticks on the things that you want to get out of the course that you're creating. And these just gives you a good base for what you're trying to accomplish, and it will help you when you begin to structure your content. Then last but not least on this page is the assessment. That's how you're going to grade yourself and hold yourself accountable. You can make this as easy or as complex as you like. I added a grading scale here, and I gave percentages, like a weight of percentages to everything that I want to do from a midpoint check on how many words I've written to the goal is to complete a polished draft or three strong chapters by the end of week four. So that's like 35% of my grade for this course. I have quizzes and self checks and also weekly exercises that I've created for myself. I have the reflection for 10%. And it says, Here, all work should be completed on schedule. If I fall behind, I'll document why, adjust my plan and make up the work within two days, like a commitment to myself. Now, for the fun part, this is where you begin to take all the materials from that other sheet and start to put them in their respective weeks. Sometimes when you're putting together a class, you'll see themes start to pop up for me when I was looking for Novella content, I saw several themes story foundations, building the world and characters, drafting and pacing and editing and sharing. And so I decided to split those topics up, subtopics up into different weeks and then bundle the content that made sense with the particular subheader. So, for example, for story Foundation, I had a lot of content that concentrated on story and just, like, learning how to write a novella. I didn't use all of it, but I used enough to feel the time that I have decided to commit to this, which is 4 hours a week. So this Skillshare course is 36 minutes. I believe YouTube video is under an hour. I have, like, a podcast I'm listening to and probably the most time commitment here is the book for Stephen King, which is what I'm going to listen to on audio. But I can kind of listen to that every day during the week in the car and so forth. And so I don't think that it should be a problem. And for the things that I need to concentrate on, I'm going to block off 2 hours, two days a week in order to sit down and do these things. So I'm fully committed to doing all of this content. Then also, I have an assignment here, which is to write one sentence, and then I have a quiz for myself, and you can use Claude or Chat GBT to do a quiz. I want to do a quiz when I finished a Stephen King book, so I can go and ask hatGBT like please give me a five question quiz on based on Stephen King's book on writing. And then it can give me the questions. I can answer the questions. I could put my answers back in there, and it can kind of let me know how I did, and I can have it grade myself. So I'll talk a little bit more about AI later, but I just wanted to give you an idea on how you can create a quiz. You can have someone else create a quiz for you. Maybe some quizzes are available online that you can use for whatever you're learning to do. There's just so many creative ways to figure out how to test yourself. And then I have, this little prompt here. And so you'll see, as I mentioned before, I have this example in the resources section. And you'll see if you open up this example that I kind of follow the same kind of theme throughout the sheet of thinking through what content I can truly get through in a week because I wanted to make sure that it wasn't too overwhelming. But I wanted enough content there where I could really start to understand the content, and I wanted to make it like a real college course. And so what I would love for you to do it's begin to fill out this sheet. There is no right or wrong. Even if you Google, like, personal curriculum videos on social media, you'll see some people might just have a book a week that they're reading, or some people might have watching YouTube video, and they might have one project that they're completing a week. There is truly no right or wrong way to do this. The point is to not make it so complicated that you don't even get started. Make it as simple as possible. Put in as much work as you want to that you're excited about putting into creating this syllabus, and then just start. You can always modify it as you go. But you just want to put some information down on paper or down digitally in order to begin your journey. So please fill out this template or whatever template you may have created for yourself in Notion or Excel or whatever else you've decided to do. And once you've done that, please move on to the next lesson. And again, be creative. There is no right or wrong. Just get started. 7. 3.1 Scheduling & Consistency: So on to Module three, tracking and celebrating your progress, the first lesson is about scheduling and consistency. So it's easy to start learning, but staying consistent could be a real challenge. I want you to treat your personal curriculum like a real class because it is. The difference is you're the one who sets the pace. Just like if you are enrolled in a college course, you need to determine your schedule or the type of class you want to enroll in. We all work differently. Some people prefer in person classes while others thrive with online learning. Some require a set time in place while others enjoy the freedom of flexibility. When you consider how to set up your curriculum schedule, I want you to think about these two options and determine which one works best for you. The first type of schedule that you can set up for yourself is what I call a fixed schedule. So just like at any major university or college, your classes are set up for specific days and times. And so if that works for you, having a specific day and time setup, this is an example of how your calendar could be set up. You can pick days that work for you. So you can say Tuesdays and Thursdays are your main days and maybe you have Saturdays for your homework. In your calendar, you would then schedule the specific time that works for you. For this example, I have given 7:00 P.M. To 9:00 P.M. As allocated time for the course. And then you'll see I also put in there actually what is expected for me to do in week one. And if I wanted to, of course, I could just maybe, let's say, I just wanted to watch one video on this day and read on this day. Maybe I just put the two items for that day onto that calendar entry. So you can set it up, however, it makes sense for you. But the point of this is, it's important to put it on your calendar, dedicate days and times if that helps you hold yourself accountable and set up reminders that will pop up 30 minutes before a class is going to start, so you could start getting your area ready and making sure you are kind of in go mode when it's time to do your course. And of course, this is just one example of a schedule. Whatever days and times work best for you, that's what you should go with, whatever you think you could stick with. Okay, on the second type of schedule I love talking about is a more flexible schedule. For two different ways, you can set up your calendar for a flexible schedule. Going with the same Tuesday, Thursday premise and Saturdays maybe for homework or just for a third day of class, instead of setting up a specific time, you can set your calendar as an all day event, and that's just like a reminder to you. At some point, you need to make time to do some of the items in your week one list. And just like before, you could copy some of those items from week one into your calendar entry, but at least it is a visual reminder for you to do these things every time you open up your calendar, and of course, you can set up reminders for these two, it'll just pop up, of course, in the morning since it's an all day event and then you just have to be really mindful about making time to fit some of the exercises into that day. A second way to reflect a flexible schedule on your calendar is to have the calendar, just having specific days just doesn't work for you, but you're really good at maybe making time in your fringe hours in order to do things, you can set up your weekly events. So for week one, I have it where I have, the week one items in there, and I have a set from Sunday to Saturday that first week in January. And then the second week, I have the second week of content that's due. That's just like another way for you to set up your flexible schedule in order for you to have some visible reminder of the things that you're supposed to do. And, of course, you can get super creative with these calendars. You can add a final assignment entry here. You can have a combination of what I've shown you four fixed and flexible schedules. The important thing is that you find a way to hold yourself accountable and that you deem this important enough that when your calendar reminder dings on your phone or your tablet or your computer that you actually take action. Like, you treat it like you treat work, and you're going to commit to it no matter what. So please take a second to think through this. And of course, in your workbook, I also have a calendar schedule. That you can use in order to just help you think through it. So you see, I've just messed around here with, like, some times and you can use this for planning purposes. And I have a little note section on the bottom, and it says, Saturday and Sundays are assignment days Monday and Wednesdays, I will read, watch and listen to the material. And then I also have a statement in here I am committed to writing at least 15 minutes a day. I misspelled that. I'll aim for the mornings. But you see where I'm getting here is like, plan out, how you want to carve out your time. And once you do that, let's move on to the next module. Homework grades, and self certification. 8. 3.2 Homework, Grades, and Self-Certification: Now let's talk about homework grades and self certification. Every meaningful curriculum should end with something tangible, something that captures your growth. That could be a final project, a reflection journal, or even a short video sharing what you learned and how you applied it. Then celebrate yourself. Print a certificate, post your results, or even invite a friend to, like, grade your work. Not for perfection, but for effort and creativity. When I taught myself punch Nedle, I shared my pieces online and gave a few away as gifts. Most recently, I finalized 12 classes for my personal curriculum after I went through my brainstorming session, and I took the time to design a Snow University seal. I know. That's super extra. But once I complete all of the 12 courses that I've set up, I am going to get that seal made into an iron on badge that I can add to my jacket. It may sound silly, but these small rewards and rituals make learning feel real. They give you, like, something to look forward to and remind you that progress deserves to be celebrated. Your learning journey is worthy of recognition. So find a way to honor your hard work and keep your momentum going. 9. 4.1 Learning Space and Exploration: First lesson under Module four, let's talk about learning spaces and exploration. Your environment shapes your mindset. Whether it's a corner desk, a coffee shop, or your couch, you need to make your space feel like your creative studio. You can add little cues that tell you your brain, like it's time to learn. Some people like music or ambient noise. Some people might want to light their favorite candle or use their favorite pen to take notes, or somebody might have, like, a little board or a visible tracker so they can see their progress, the progress that they've made on their curriculum. So you're creating an experience not just checking off lessons. For example, I prefer to work in complete silence. It forces me to focus and lets me, lock in without distractions. But that's just me, right? Other people need something in the background. So please take time to think about where you're going to learn and how you want that to look. So let's get into exploration. Remember your curriculum should energize you, not exhaust you. So schedule explorations. And that could mean visiting a museum, going to a craft market or watching a film related to your topic. Don't just sit at your desk or on your couch only during your class time. Get out and do things, even if maybe, you know, you're not one to go out much. Try to, like, add a little bit of exploration to your curriculum. And remember, at the end of each week, make sure you are taking that time to reflect. I just want to double down on that, like I did. In a previous lesson, but I want to add some additional questions that you can ask yourself at the end of each week, which are what inspired you, what challenged you? And what do you want to explore next? Learning is more meaningful when you connected to your life. And so just by constantly reflecting on what you've done will help you appreciate even more the hard work that you're putting in. 10. 4.2 Using AI to Shape Your Curriculum: In this lesson, I want to talk about using AI to help shape your curriculum. One of the best ways to supercharge your personal curriculum is by using AI as your research and organization assistant. Think of it as your study partner available 247. Before using AI, do your own initial research and develop your own list. I purposely added this to the end of this class, so you wouldn't use AI as a crutch. But I do think that using AI is very effective, but it is important to balance it with your own research, your own critical thinking. Here's how I suggest using AI effectively. The first way is brainstorming. And there's brainstorming, there's resource discovery, syllabus structuring and accountability prompts. But I want to start with brainstorming. My first prompt might be, I want to create a one month personal curriculum for writing a novel. I've never written a book before. What do I need to learn? Ask me some key questions so you can determine what resources might work for me. Give me three potential projects I can realistically complete in a month after finishing my curriculum. So it writes back like, why do you want to write a novel? Do you already have a story idea or are you starting from scratch? What kind of stories do you love to write? And then it has questions about writing experience and comfort, time and structure and some questions that I can answer about my learning style. And then it says, once I've answered the question that it can help design a four week personal curriculum, recommend specific authors videos and books, and outline three realistic one month projects. Of course, I'm not about to answer all of these questions that would take me definitely down a rabbit hole. But you can see by asking these questions and having a conversation with whatever chat box you decide to use, it can help you think through what you want to do. So, for example, we have decided to create a novela. And so how may how did I get there? I was doing some research on the types of fiction novels there are. And so, just to give you an example as part of your brainstorming, like if you didn't want to answer all these questions, but ask more questions, you could ask something like, What are the different types of fiction? And now it is giving me by length and structure, different types of fiction from flash fiction, from short story to novelette to Novella to novel to series and saga and so on and so forth. And it also is giving me all of the genres that I can write in. And so you can see how you could go down a rabbit hole. Like, if I run into we young adult or mystery, I can ask you some questions about that. And then, based on the answers to those questions, I can then determine what direction I want to grow. Oh, do I want to write a novella? Do I want to maybe do something simple like a short story? That's 1,000 to 750 words? Do I want to write a romance novel or a fantasy novel? But just by going back and forth with the chat box, it will help me break down exactly what I want to do. So you can see how this could be an excellent brainstorming tool so you can figure out what you want to focus on if you don't yet have clarity on that. Well, another way you can use AI in order to help you with your personal curriculum is resource discovery. So, for example, you can ask your chat box. I've decided to write a novela. Can you provide a list of reading and video materials I should consider for my one month curriculum? Also, I like to include some DC events related to writing novelas. Now, of course, keeping your self assessment in mind, you can ask for, you know, more or less of the type of content you want. Do you want more blog articles? Do you want more books. Do you want more videos? Do you want it to find classes? You should get pretty specific in your prompt. But for this example, I just kept it pretty general. And so it has provided me with some videos that I can consider. It also has provided me with some books and guides, one of which I've already included, which is the Stephen King. Okay. W. And then it has also given me writing events in the DC area where I'm based, and I could consider some of these events in my curriculum. And it also provided unprovoked a section how to use these in your curriculum. Here's how you can incorporate the above into your one month plan. And it has foundations, plot and structure, voice dialogue, and scene workk and the revisions and next steps, which is interesting because I went through the four ways I broke down my content. So there are some similarities here, but they're slightly different. So I could take this into consideration and modify my current curriculum if I so choose. Um, but you can see here how Cha chiPT was able to give me some resources, at least to start with. And then, let's say, if I didn't really like any of these, I can say, like, Hey, these YouTube videos are too long or too short or I'm looking for more mystery Novella writers or fantasy or whatever. And so I could have this chat with ChatGBT to get even more examples of what I might want to potentially use. And so, depending on the type of content, you could really, really dive deep with Chat GBT Cloud, whatever your AI tool of choice is, in order to, like, help you discover resources you haven't already found through your own searches. The third way that I mentioned about using AI effectively is potentially for syllabus structuring. So I'm going to open up my class PDF and in the class PDF, of course, I have already broken my content down into four weeks. But let's say I hadn't. I could create a prompt that says Below, I've added the course materials and an event I want to include in my personal curriculum. Organize them into a four week syllabus that begins the week of November 16. I can only dedicate 6 hours per week to learning, make it achievable. What I did is I copied and pasted all of the course material, even though there are a few that I didn't actually include in my final. I could tell it to kick some of it, but I'll just leave it as it is for this example. But I've pasted it all below. It's okay if it's not pretty. And then I just picked one of the events from the link that I had in the PDF that starts on November 20, which is why I decided to ask ChaGBT to start my class in the middle of November just for the heck of it. Alright, so as always, ChaGBT is praising me. Perfect. You've already assembled an outstanding list of materials that balance story, character, and editing. And so it now lists the personal curriculum below, start date, November 16, time commitment 6 hours, go build core fiction skills in structure character, and editing to outline and draft your own novella. And so it has, like, what week one will be the theme, the goal, it has like 2 hours of watch time, 1.5 hours of read time, one hours of listening time and reflect and write. And then it has, like, an optional event which I put in there, which happens to fall on the first week. And then it does the same two for week two, week three, and Week four. So this is, like, a great start. You definitely have to use some critical thinking and look through it, make sure that whatever tool you use has bucketed it into the right week. You also need to make sure that it read the time stamps on all the different videos accurately. So it's saying, like, watch these for 2 hours, but how long are they really, am I only watching half of it? All of it? Will I have 30 minutes left after watching these videos. So you still have to go in and do kind of, like, some critical thinking on your own about, is this really achievable? Like, where it says, read, 2 hours, are these articles? Are these books? So am I just reading until I stop? You know, so you have to you do need to check the work. And then it says, by December 13, you'll have a Novella concept and full outline, opening scene draft, a working editing checklist and a foundation for continued drafting through winter. And you might not be able to see it, but in each of the weeks, it did have, like, a writing prompt. And so the writing prompt in practice is supposed to help me with achieving my goal of having something written at the end of four weeks. Um, at the end of it, it says, Would you like me to format this as a printable syllabus PDF? And so I could say, yes, I could have it exported as a spreadsheet if I wanted to, or I could start asking you questions, maybe to move around things, telling it, I don't like something. So I can really go back and forth here and massage the content. So I encourage you to play around with it. The second way is like, you've already created. If you've done your syllabus already because you've been following all of the prompts, you could attach your PDF. So I'm going to attach my PDF. And I also wrote a prompt, just a simple one that just says, thanks because, you know, they always say, thank the machine, please and thank you. We'll know when it's going to take over the world. Okay, so thanks. I've attached a PDF of the syllabus I put together along with some additional thoughts. Let me know if I'm missing something. Also, create the content for the quizzes I've outlined. Alright, let's see what it does. It says it's reviewed my PDF, and it says, I've done an excellent job at structuring. Here's some feedback. So overall assessment, it likes my themes. It says I've balanced the modalities, thoughtful evaluations, some minor suggestions. It says I need to maybe add a daily writing habit metric. Um, clarify quiz format. Do I want multiple choice, short answer or reflection, and post course reflection. It says, after Week four, add one What's next unquote page to plan revision or publication steps. So so those are some suggestions for me to take into consideration. And then it also for the week one quiz I have outlined, it has given me a quiz with the answer, but I could always modify that prompt and say, you know, please create a quiz, but don't give me the answers yet because yeah, this is, like, cheating. Week three, it also gave me a quiz. And that kind of goes into actually, the quiz goes into the accountability prompts. So, you know, I've already talked about brainstorming, resource discovery, syllabus structuring. And the last thing was accountability prompts. And so, since I already had something in my syllabus, I asked it to go ahead and create some quizzes. But I could also ask it for some reflection prompt ideas, ideas on what my final project should be, what I realistically can write in a month with only being able to dedicate 6 hours a week, you can have a chat box help you with, like, your final project and or quizzes, tests, journal prompts, you name it. It can help you with those accountability resources that you want to put together. Last fois, I'll mention it can also help with tracking progress. So you can ask AI to, like, summarize your weekly notes or progress logs, turning kind of like your messy thoughts into usable insights or have it help you build a calendar or tracker to, like, visualize your progress. So there's just so many different ways that you can use AI. I'm just dabbling with it a little bit here just to make sure that you know that there is another tool that you can use in order to help you come up with a curriculum in no time. Let's go to the next section, reflect, refine, and share. 11. 4.3 Reflect, Refine, and Share: Hi. The last lesson in Module four, reflect, refine, and share. You've been shaping your personal curriculum throughout this class, adding ideas, refining your goals, and creating a structure that fits your life. Now it's time to pause and reflect on what you've built and give it one, last polish. Revisit your template or notes and ask yourself these questions. Does this plan still reflect what excites me most right now? Are there any lessons, resources, or goals I want to adjust? What worked well during this process and what would I change the next time I created a curriculum? This reflection isn't about rewriting everything. It's about aligning your curriculum with where you are today. Once you refined your plan, document your key takeaways, what you learned about yourself, your creative process, or how you learn best. You can capture this in a journal, a short reflection video, or a post. When you're ready, share your completed curriculum and reflections in the Skillshare project gallery. This is a learning community, and your syllabus can help others learn a new topic, please share it. I'll be checking in to see what you've created and also to see if you have any questions and to celebrate how far you've come. Remember, reflection is part of mastery. It's what turns learning into growth. Thank you for taking my class, and I hope you enjoyed it. Take care.