Multi-level Lesson Pages

Hi, I have been test/model site building on Drupal 7, but am planning to build the production site on Drupal 8. In my pedagogy system, each lesson topic within a learning module or course is divided into more than one level of learning. Each level up requires the completion of the previous level in the same way as one lesson might depend on a previous lesson, or a course depend on a previous course. The horizontal plain however, is not always dependent on the previous course or lesson topic, which gives some freedom in the learning path for students. Each level of the lesson unit/topic needs to be clearly differentiated from the others by theme, e.g. layout, logos, background image or colour perhaps. The slides system is however homogenous and ideally learning content should always be stored separately from the code. What would a good way to develop this multi-dimensional / matrix structure of the lesson units? So far, I have been considering that the simplest way to do this is to create new content types for lesson pages that can be linked or, imported and embedded into the theory slides. These would then be created first, separately, before creating the slide framework. In effect this would become like a micro-site or mini-lesson unit contained within the slide. Will this work? Does anyone have any better suggestions? Kr, Chris