Personal Curriculum Ideas for Assignments (That Are Actually Fun)

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Hopping on the personal curriculum trend? Great! You’re in the right spot.

In this series, I’ll guide you through…

What a personal curriculum is and common mistakes to avoid,
How to design the perfect curriculum step-by-step,
Some personal curriculum ideas for topics, including new skills to learn and hobbies to try,
Where to find free, reputable resources,
Personal curriculum ideas for assignments, and
The best study tips for busy adults

You may have already chosen your topic and found your resources. But what about assignments? Do you really need them?

Yes! But don’t worry. I’ve got all the info you need to quickly come up with the perfect assignments for your personal curriculum.

These will ensure you’re learning as you progress through your personal curriculum. But they won’t cause you stress like assignments in school did.

Table of Contents

What is a Personal Curriculum?

I encourage you to review this post for a more comprehensive description of the personal curriculum trend. But in short, it’s a method for adults to support personal development and keep learning new things, even outside of school or a formal class.

You can choose whatever topic you want to know more about. Then design your own study path based on your preferences and schedule.

A self curriculum should include all the stuff you’d see in a course syllabus in school: a timeline, required readings, and assignments (which we’ll talk about below!).

But there’s a key difference between a personal curriculum and a syllabus you may have received in school. You are the architect of your personal curriculum. That means all the topics and readings will be fascinating to you. And you’ll enjoy completing the assignments.

Sounds like a lot more fun than that organic chemistry course you had to endure in college, right?

The trend, as far as I know, started on TikTok. That’s right, the last place you’d expect people to be promoting in-depth study. I’ve mostly seen it attributed to TikTok creator Elizabeth Jean (@xparmesanprincessx).

And it’s not just for people who treat research as a hobby in general. In fact, most people embracing the trend claim they’re doing it to combat “brain rot” – the feeling that your cognitive skills have weakened from non-stop passive consumption of quick, low-quality online content. That being said, there are many reasons someone may want to design a personal curriculum.

Why Add Assignments to Your Personal Curriculum?

Woman using video editing software on a laptop. Personal curriculum ideas for assignments include practicing new skills. — Photo by MART PRODUCTION

Ok, let’s say you want to design a personal curriculum, you know exactly what to learn, and you’ve found your resources to study.

You might think you can just read, watch, or listen to all the resources you’ve found, and that will be enough.

If you’re like most of us, you hated assignments in school. So, do you really need to add them to an adult curriculum you’re doing just for yourself?

Well, yes. There’s a reason your teachers included them. It wasn’t just to torture you. Assignments and tests are the only way to measure if you’re actually learning. That is, if the curriculum works or not.

Don’t think of assignments as “tests” that cause anxiety. Remember, you’re in control of this curriculum. And you’re the only one who’s going to evaluate your own progress.

Instead, sprinkle assignments throughout your curriculum to determine whether or not you’ve learned the material you wanted to learn. If you find you can’t complete an assignment because you don’t know enough, that’s your sign to go back and review the material you recently studied.

How to Approach Personal Curriculum Assignments

Okay, so we agree that you have to include assignments. How will they be different from the assignments you had in school?

Here are some tips for designing assignments for your unique self curriculum.

1. Consider Your Topic

As I covered in a post about personal curriculum ideas for topics, I see 3 general categories of personal curriculum topics:

Skills or knowledge that would be useful for your life/career
Skills or hobbies that you just think are fun
Interests you never have time to explore deeply

Different types of assignments will make sense for each of these categories.

Life or Career Skills Assignments

For life or career skills curricula, your assignments will be practical. If you’re studying personal finance, you may assign yourself the task of setting up a monthly budget and following it for one month.

If you’re learning public speaking or presentation skills, you might create a presentation on a topic related to your job and deliver it to a partner or friend, then ask for feedback.

The goal of this type of assignment is very direct: mimic what you’d need to do with this skill in life or in a job. Can you do it competently? Then you know your personal curriculum was successful.

Fun Skills or Hobbies Assignments

If your personal curriculum is focused on learning a skill just for fun, your assignments won’t be too different from those above. Your goal will still be to test whether or not you can competently do something related to that hobby.

If you’re learning nail art, you’ll choose a particular design and practice implementing it on a friend or on yourself. See how it turns out, and which parts felt challenging. Then, keep practicing those weak points.

If you’re learning creative writing, you may write a short story and share it with another aspiring writer for feedback.

Intellectual Interests Assignments

If your personal curriculum is dedicated to researching a topic you simply find fascinating – even though it doesn’t currently have a practical use in your life – your assignments will be a bit different.

Your goal will be to demonstrate that you understand the topic you chose. How you demonstrate that is really up to you and your preferences.

If you love writing, you may enjoy synthesizing all you’ve learned into a research paper.

If you’re great at editing videos, you might create a video essay on your topic and post it to YouTube.

Your assignment could even be as informal as explaining a particular topic to a friend who’s unfamiliar with it. As you explain it, you’ll notice which parts feel fuzzy in your mind. And you can go back and review those again. If you can clearly and succinctly explain a topic to a novice, you’ll know that you have mastered it.

2. Choose Things You Like Doing

We got into this a bit above, but I definitely recommend choosing things you like doing for your assignments.

Hated writing essays in school? Great, you can skip those entirely. Or maybe it was presentations that gave you anxiety. Yep – you can avoid those, too.

The best part of the personal curriculum is that it’s completely designed for your preferences.

Yes, you need assignments to check if you’re learning and to challenge yourself. But they don’t need to be unpleasant.

See the list of personal curriculum ideas for assignments below. And think about what you liked doing in school.

Did you enjoy writing? Or creative projects that let you synthesize information in interesting ways through collage, video, etc.?

Are you much better at speaking than writing and would prefer to demonstrate your new skills through talking?

Any and all of those are valid. Taking a few minutes to reflect on your preferences will greatly increase your chances of successfully completing your curriculum.

3. Include Several “Formative” Assignments

One of the reasons I’m so excited about the personal curriculum trend is that my “day job” is in adult education. So, I will use just a tiny bit of jargon to explain this concept.

There are two types of assignments: formative and summative.

Formative assignments happen regularly throughout your curriculum. They test your knowledge or skill around a specific “chunk” of information.

You should set an assignment at the end of each week or every two weeks, depending on the timeline of your curriculum and how often you’re learning new material.

The assignment should require you to do something. Not just passively read or listen.

Here are some examples of formative assignments:

Let’s say your curriculum is on the topic of “the psychology of cults.” This week, you read an article about tactics cult leaders use to keep followers obedient and one about factors that make people vulnerable to cult manipulation. Your assignment could be to invite your friend who loves cult documentaries out for coffee, verbally summarize what you learned from those articles, and answer her questions.

If your curriculum is focused on birdwatching, you may have spent the week studying the calls of several types of birds. You could ask a partner or friend to play audio clips of each bird call to test your ability to recognize them when randomly shuffled.

If you’re learning the basics of sewing, let’s say you spent the week learning how to sew on buttons. Your assignment this week can be as simple as sewing a button on an item from your closet that needs repair.

4. Include One “Summative” Assignment

The other type of assignment is called a “summative” assignment. This is a culminating project at the end of your timeline that demonstrates your mastery of the entire curriculum.

Some examples of summative assignments you may have encountered in school include a final exam, a research paper, or a portfolio.

For your personal curriculum, set yourself a summative assignment that will demonstrate that you learned what you intended to.

Here are some examples:

Let’s say your personal curriculum revolves around cooking skills. Your final, summative assignment could be to invite friends over for a dinner party and cook several dishes – an appetizer, main course, dessert, etc. It will challenge you and test how well you learned certain techniques. But you also get to have a fun night with friends.

If you studied project management techniques through your personal curriculum, your summative assignment might be to develop a project plan for a sample project. This could be something that you deal with in your work. Or it could be something like a home renovation project you hope to complete one day. Either way, you’re testing your skills while at the same time creating something of value that you can use in your job or life.

Or let’s say your personal curriculum centered on an intellectual interest like the portrayal of a particular minority group in cinema. Your summative assignment could be a blog post, research paper, or video essay that analyzes several famous films and points out themes that cut through all of them about how that group is portrayed. Sure, this is a passion project you’re doing for yourself. But if you put it online, others interested in that topic can benefit from your creation.