When I lead AOW, each dive has specific objectives and tasks, but not the kind of basic skills that you have in OW. Navigation, buoyancy and trim are emphasized by me on every dive. We also do more dive planning, and task loading. Our typical set of dives is Altitude dive, wreck dive, navigation dive, search and recovery dive, and deep dive. Among the tasks we engage in addition to navigation are towing a dive flag, deploying an smb from depth, and stringing a line and retrieving it ( but we do not penetrate on the wreck dive. ) Not all courses incorporate all these tasks, but my view is that aow is to extend the student beyond just focusing on diving to moving to the point of "doing tasks" while diving. It is a big step, and we work on buoyancy and trim becoming more or less automatic. Then you can do other things- take pictures, chart fish populations, observe wildlife without crashing the reef or disturbing the bottom, etc. Enjoy the class as moving from being able to dive to being able to do things while diving, and diving independently, doing and carrying our your own dive plan with your buddy.
DivemasterDennis