[curt.clifton]

Steve,

I use a separate project for each of my courses, each term. I have detailed templates for starting a course (pre-term planning), prepping each week (including individual meetings during the week), and wrapping up a course. I do a bit of planning to design these templates up front, and add to them as I get a feel for how the course is working. I use my Populate Template Placeholders script each week to populate a new week's worth of tasks. I drag the resulting one-week project into my course project as an action group. This lets my Focus on the course.

This seems to strike a good balance. I don't plan the tasks completely ahead of time, but after a few weeks my templates evolve to cover most circumstances. Because I'm not populating the templates for the whole term at the beginning, subsequent weeks benefit from the discoveries of earlier weeks.

The level of detail in your examples is about what I strive for. I want enough detail that I can just crank out widgets. Second offerings of courses are seamless this way.