In this video, we will discuss the role of introduction in understanding information by your student and what should be included in your Course introduction videos.

The role of introduction

The role of the Introduction is to prepare the student for the learning process. The way our memory works is the following:

• We need to structure information to memorize it.
• We need to make sense of it.
• We need to know where to store it.

If the instructor does this work for you it saves time.

Otherwise, if you understand it or not, your brain works to assimilate the information. It uses your resources and fatigue builds up over time. Our students should have the best.

The “why does a student need it”

Next is Understanding why you are learning something where it is going to be useful is more effective than memorizing information without application. Have you heard pupils in the school say: why we are learning this, we are not going to use it?

Most Public schools have brilliant programs and materials that can make any person a genius. But there is not enough explanation of where and how it is going to be applied in real life, thus the learning process can become boring and difficult.

To avoid this fate for our course we need to make an Advertising Campaign out of our introduction.

• Make an overview of the modules.
• Explain what is going to be achieved and why it is necessary.
• What will be covered in the lessons?

This is the minimum.

Inspiration

What we have discussed so far is the minimum requirement for the Course Introduction. If you want to do better:

• Inspire your students about upcoming results
• Ensure them that with your assistance they will get through

Many people enrol on your course because your course promises them results, they could not have without it. Maybe they tried before and failed or they want to achieve something faster with your course because they don’t have time to work on it on their own.

So Inspiration might help them build trust in themselves or get excited about the process.

Recommendations

This can be done by adding into your Introduction the Recommendations on how to get the best out of your course.

This part of the Introduction includes

• How do you want the lessons to be done
• How to approach practical tasks
• How to structure the educational process (time allocation etc)
• Where to find additional learning materials and so on.

Here you model your student’s behavior on the course and attitude to the learning process. Share the expectations you have for students.

When do you create the introduction content

Practically it might be difficult for you to create the introduction from the beginning. Because you don’t know what is going to be included in your course yet and you might not understand what you want your students to do.

Here is are my recommendations:

1. Firstly, create a structure for your course – If you don’t know what would be the content of your course you will not be able to write the introduction content.
2. Draft the course introduction after you have your structure – an explanation of the content might help you in content creation. When you explain to the students why and what they should learn it makes sense for you first of all, so that you are confident about your product.
3. Draft the course recommendations before or after the full course content development – some students prefer writing recommendations straight from the beginning because they know what they expect from students to succeed in the program. Maybe they have the experience.
   Some programs might not have recommendations at all at the beginning because it is not clear what is expected from students.
   My experience is that I write recommendations and place them in a separate video because they might change over time after you start running your course. It is easier to re-record this part of the introduction. But it also can be one lesson with the content overview.
4. You will get back to it and adjust – Don’t worry that you can’t include everything in the introduction.
   If during the development of the course content you will need to find that updates are necessary to the intro, it is not the issue. Usually content changes over time. The content that was not mentioned in the course introduction will exceed the student’s expectations you have set.  

In the next lesson, we will review the next content type – Theoretical lessons