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Curating Lessons

Every article Mention writes for your audience gets a lesson: 5 to 9 exercises composed from that article, which is how members actually finish an entry. This page covers what a lesson is made of, and how to walk through one before your team meets it.

For the table of contents that produces the articles in the first place, see Curating Contents.

You don't commission a lesson

There is no second prompt to write. When Mention finishes writing an article, it composes that article's lesson from the finished document — one article, one lesson. When the article is rewritten, because you changed its prompt or its source material shifted, the lesson is composed again from the updated document.

Your lever over what a lesson says is therefore the same lever as before: the entry's prompt and the sources behind it. To change what a lesson asks, change the article it was composed from.

Composing a lesson consumes credits, the same way writing the article does.

A lesson always has:

  • between 5 and 9 exercises;
  • at least 3 graded exercises;
  • at least 4 distinct pieces of material — a lesson that drills one fact five ways is a worksheet;
  • at most one warm-up (prediction), and if it has one, it comes first;
  • a correction on every exercise, and no setup that gives away its own answer.

Walking through a lesson

Open the audience, go to the Curriculum tab, open the entry, and switch to Lesson. The tab puts you straight into the lesson itself, one exercise at a time, the way a learner meets it.

You answer. That is the point: a lesson you have only read is a lesson you have not checked. Submit an answer and Mention shows you the back half of that exercise — the correction, the answer key or the rubric criteria, and the reference answer — then moves you on to the next one. At the end you can walk it again.

A walkthrough records nothing. It creates no progress for you, spends no credits, and never appears in adoption. Owners are not learners: you hold no progress in an audience you run, so there is no attempt here to make.

One thing behaves differently from a learner's run, because it has to:

  • Written answers are not graded. Instead of judging your prose, the walkthrough shows you the rubric it would have been judged against, plus an answer that would pass. That is the thing worth reading anyway.

Exercises where the learner picks an option are marked right or wrong as you go, because the answer key is right there.

Read the rubrics. A rubric is a short list of criteria a written answer has to meet, and every complaint your learners will have about fairness traces back to how one is worded. A vague criterion grades vibes; an over-specific one fails a correct answer phrased unexpectedly. Unlike a wrong answer key, a bad rubric does not look wrong when you skim it. This is the part of the walkthrough worth your attention.

Learners never see any of that except the question and its setup. Keys, rubrics, and corrections reach a member only in the response to an attempt they have already committed to.

When an article can't carry a lesson

Some articles have nothing to exercise. A page of links, a list of names with nothing that turns on them — forcing exercises onto inert material produces worse artifacts than admitting the article is the whole product for that entry.

Being a reference rather than a set of steps is not what makes an article inert. A reference is exercised by applying its facts to a case and telling near-identical cases apart, and the exercises Mention has available to it follow from the article's kind: no explaining a document with no "why" in it, no reconstructing a procedure a description never contained. See Articles and Lessons.

When that happens, Mention says so: the entry keeps its article, and its lesson shows as No lesson possible with a one-line reason for what the article does not afford. That is a judgement about the material, not a fault — it is kept separate from Lesson failed, which is what you see when composition broke for the ordinary reasons, such as the organization running out of credits. In every case a previously composed lesson stays available to learners; a failed recompose never takes a working lesson away.