Plan your syllabus in chat with Claude — see which weeks are locked
Attach your syllabus and Claude shows which weeks are locked by real prerequisites and which you're free to rearrange — right in chat as you work through the order.
- AuthorAnthropic
- CategoryEducation
- ModelSonnet 4.6
- Features
- ShareCopy link
1
Describe the task
You know every topic in the course. What's harder to see is which weeks are in that order because they have to be, and which are there because that's where you or the textbook put them. Working as a list, those look the same.
You ask Claude about the order, and the graph appears as part of its answer. It shows which weeks are locked by real prerequisites and which are there by habit — so you can see where you have room to rearrange.
Here an econ professor keeps reordering the middle of a fifteen-week intro course. Claude lays out the weeks by tier, tags each one locked, moderate, or flexible, and pulls alternative orderings from Mankiw, Blanchard, and the other standard texts.
I'm building a 15-week Intro to Macro syllabus and I keep second-guessing the order. Can you map out which topics actually depend on which — like, what do they need to get first before the later stuff makes sense? I want to see where I have flexibility and where the sequence is locked. If I click a topic, tell me if there's another common way to order it.
2
Give Claude context
Attach the working syllabus — topic list with week numbers is enough. If you're teaching from a specific book, say which; the alternative-ordering guidance gets sharper.
Required context
The syllabus.
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Previous syllabus
PDF
Previous syllabus
PDF
Optional context
Google Drive if the syllabus lives there. A Project if you'll refine this across terms — come back next semester, adjust, redraw.
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3
What Claude creates
Claude draws the course as a graph — locked weeks in one color, movable weeks in another. Click any topic and a panel shows what comes before it, what it unlocks, and how the major textbooks handle that same spot in the sequence. You get a second opinion on each ordering choice.
From Claude
4
Follow up prompts
Continue the conversation with Claude to refine, expand, or explore further.
Ask Claude to redraw with one thing moved
Try a reorder before you commit to it — name the move, Claude redraws, and anything that loses a prerequisite lights up.
Redraw the map with Money & Banking in Week 4 instead of Week 8. Show me what downstream topics lose a prereq.
Ask Claude to write the revised syllabus from the graph
Claude writes the week-by-week syllabus based on the order you landed on in the graph — with chapter mappings — ready to hand to students.
Write the revised schedule based on the reorder we landed on. Week by week, with chapter mappings.
5
Tricks, tips, and troubleshooting
How you word your prompt shapes what you get
"Which topics depend on which" is the phrasing that gets a graph — you're asking for structure, and a graph shows where the flex is. Works on anything you're sequencing: a training plan, an onboarding path, a reading list where some things build on others.
Check the visual against your own understanding
The locked/flexible tags are Claude's reading of the dependencies — based on standard textbook orderings and prerequisite logic. You know your course. If Claude marked a week "flexible" that you know has a hidden dependency (a concept you build on in discussion, a problem set that assumes it), that's worth catching before you reorder. Where you'd tag it differently is where your course-specific knowledge beats the generic read.
What to do with the visual next
Save as Artifact and share the dependency view with students — the map you used to plan is a study map for them. Create skill from visual has Claude remember this format for next semester's course. Or ask for the revised syllabus itself as a document, once the order's settled.
Ready to try for yourself?
Try it on the syllabus where the middle keeps moving around — attach it, ask which topics depend on which, and see where you have room to rearrange. Web or desktop at claude.ai.
