The method · public, and yours to use

How this is taught, and why each bit is there

Every lesson is built the same way, in the same order, and has to pass the same twelve checks. This page is the whole thing. Take it and use it — it is published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and it is more useful to you than it is secret.

Seven steps, in the order they are written

Step 1

Start from a moment, not a topic

Not "email management". Somebody sent a thread with forty replies and asked what we decided. Topics are how institutions organise content. Moments are how people search. Test: could you overhear this in a break room?

Step 2

Name the outcome, then name the exit

One observable thing the reader can do afterwards, written as a verb they perform rather than something they understand. Then, immediately, who should skip it. If half the audience should leave, say so.

Step 3

Cut to the smallest true thing

If it does not change what the reader does in the next twelve minutes, it is not in this lesson. Then do the whole thing with a stopwatch, at the pace of somebody meeting it for the first time, and publish the number that comes out.

Step 4

Show, then let them try with the answer visible

Every step says what the reader should see afterwards. That is what stops somebody quietly concluding they have broken something. Then one worked variant with the answer shown, before anything unaided. That guided middle is where most free training has a hole.

Step 5

Write down what went wrong

Two to four real failures, hit while doing the lesson, and what to do about each. Required, not optional. It is the difference between teaching and documenting.

Step 6

One real task, today

On the reader's own machine or in their own life, under ten minutes, producing something that did not exist before. Four tests: is it real, is it today, is it one thing, does it make something.

Step 7

Check it, then leave one way forward

Twelve checks. A published date and a last-checked date. Then exactly one link to the next lesson, not a grid of related content.

The lesson spine

Thirteen blocks, in order. A missing outcome, entry criteria, failure list, do-today or check block fails the build rather than getting a warning.

Breadcrumb — track, then path
Mono label — lesson number, track, time, last checked
Title — the moment
Outcome — "After this you will be able to X"
Skip this if — honest entry criteria
What you need — device, account, licence, cost
Retrieval opener — one question about the previous lesson
Steps — numbered, each saying what you should see
Try this one first — a worked variant with the answer visible
If it goes wrong — two to four real failures
Do today — one task. The only green block on the page
Where else this works — two dissimilar situations
Practice card, check block, and exactly one next lesson

The explainer bar

A lesson has a spine and twelve checks. An explainer is a different thing with a different bar, and its bar is enforced by a script rather than by a person. A page will not publish unless all of this is true.

Five to ten screens. One idea each. If it needs eleven, it is two pages, or it is a lesson.
Under 120 words on the whole page. Headings, captions and the footer all count.
A picture on every screen, drawn as inline SVG from six shapes: a box, a line, an arrow, a square dot, a dashed frame, a label. No photographs, no icons, no stock, no screenshots.
A written description on every picture, so a screen reader gets the same idea as a sighted reader. Missing one fails the build.
Brand colours only. Green marks the thing being explained, amber the thing you do. Any other value fails.
No exclamation marks, and no banned words — including the phrase "it's easy", which is the whole point of the site.

The script is deliberately blunt. It cannot tell whether a page is any good; it can only tell whether it broke a rule. A person still reads every one before it goes up.

What was deliberately left out

Learning styles

No evidence behind them. There will never be a "visual learner" route here.

A quiz at the end

A quiz about the lesson measures whether you read the lesson. Around twenty free UK providers end this way. It is the ending this site differentiates against.

Completion certificates

They measure attendance. This audience has been measured enough.

Video by default

It cannot be skimmed, it needs headphones somebody may not have, and it is wrong the moment a menu moves. Where video helps it sits alongside the text, never instead of it, always with a transcript.

Streaks, badges, progress bars, scores

Anything that makes a learner feel measured works against the one rule this site has.

Accounts and logins

Not now, not later. Retrieval and spacing are done with prompts instead, which needs no account.

The learner is not behind. Nobody taught them.
The one rule that settles every argument

Where this comes from

None of this is invented. Backward design from Wiggins and McTighe. The outcome is written before the teaching. The five principles from Merrill, and the fifth, integration into the learner's own world, is the step nearly every free provider drops; it is the do-today task. Cognitive load theory from Sweller, which is why there are no icons standing in for words and no related-content sidebars. Multimedia principles from Mayer, including redundancy, which is a reason not to narrate text that is already written. Explicit instruction from Rosenshine, which is most of the shape above. Retrieval and spacing from Roediger and Karpicke, done in the only way available without accounts. Andragogy from Knowles, which is why lessons are named after situations rather than subjects.

No effect sizes or study statistics are quoted from any of them here. If any are used in public copy, the specific paper gets cited.

The twelve checks · How this is made, including the AI declaration · Standards