Welcome to QA and welcome to your learning dashboard.

This short tour will help you familiar with the platform so you can focus on building your skills, tracking your progress, and staying on target.

When you first log in, you'll land right here on your personal dashboard, kind of your home base, where you'll see what's been assigned to you, how much you completed, and what's coming up next. So it's designed to keep you focused, motivated, and control of your learning journey front and centre.

You'll see your My Assignment section, which will show specific learning activities that have been assigned to you, whether that's programs or the custom blend of content and blended learning.

And you'll see two tabs you have active and completed. Logically, Active is everything that is currently assigned to you. Completed is going to be everything that you have already completed.

So, for each active assignment, you'll see a quick snapshot. You'll see progress as a percentage indicated here, and you'll also see a status indicator relative to the due date for that assigned content. Obviously, if you're a bit behind, that means that you might need to put in a little bit of extra time to catch up. If you're on track, you are consuming just the right amount of content each week in order to consume it all by the due date. And if you see the warning symbol, you definitely need to do a little bit of extra studying and prioritize and sort of re-evaluate how much time you're spending each week on consuming that content.

Just to the bottom right of your assignments, you'll see a tab here called or which you called my weekly goal. It's kind of a little mini game or just I would kind of consider it kind of a momentum builder. It's a way to stay accountable to yourself by setting a realistic target for how much time you want to spend learning each week. And this will all be completely dependent upon when the due dates are for your assignments as well. But if you want to spend just a couple of days a week studying or three days a week, you can indicate that here. And each day that you spend learning, you will be credited for that. And you can build streaks over time from there.

Over on the left-hand side of the screen, there are a couple of other tabs. Outside of the home tab, you do have my activity. As you would expect, this is all the content that you have started but have not yet completed. You can see exactly what it is, what's contained within that, your progress throughout it, and the expected amount of time that that content represents. If you're not interested anymore, you could always clear this tab out, get rid of it. I'm going to come back and see you later.

You'll also see your completed tab. This is a great way to go back and revisit some of the things that you are may have found more interesting than others or that you may want to review. You can sort things by content type as well, whether you're going to be interested in reviewing the labs or going back over some of the video lessons to review for an exam or what not.

The other tab that we see on the left-hand side is my bookmarks. As you'd expect, this is where anything that you've bookmarked will show up. So anytime you see the universal bookmark icon on a course, a lesson, a lab, a document, any other type of content where it's available, click on it. It's going to show up here. So, you can create a repository of things that you're interested in visiting in the future, or if it's something that you're going to be accessing often as a reference, it's a great place to house it so you don't have to go looking for it every time.

Next to the Bookmarks tab, here is section called Saved explanations. And just very quickly, this is a really useful feature for creating what I would consider study guides for the exams. Every time you take an exam, we give you an answer key. And for every answer, we give you an explanation of what the correct answer is. So if this person got this question wrong on the exam, they can save this explanation. It shows up in their bookmarks. So they have a very convenient place to go find the things that they need to work on and study. And we include links directly to that content so that you don't have to go back through hours of lessons trying to find the information that you may have missed from there. And I'll explain a little bit more about this once we get to that section in the exams.

And going back to the dashboard, just a couple more things that I want to point out. As you'd expect, you can browse the library through our menu tree here. You can search for things broadly or specifically in the search bar. And over on the right hand side, we have the help section.

The Help Center is a really deep knowledge base, gives you a wealth of information, great for any learner, especially useful for team managers and admins. Getting started is a collection of information that goes over some of the things I'm going over today, as well as some other information about little features here and there within the platform. It's it's really great resource. And then anytime you have a technical issue or have general questions, you can contact support and they'll triage that to the appropriate party.

One other thing I want to point out that's really neat. Update my profile picture here. There is menu that opens up and you'll see skills profile. So all of our content does have skills tagged and associated with them. Whenever you take a lab or an exam, it increases depending on whether you pass it or not will increase what's called your skill score.

1000 is considered extremely proficient. It's the highest you can get. Everyone starts out at 0. So as you go through and take increasingly difficult exams and labs, your skill scores will increase proportionate to the level of difficulty of the content that you're progressing through. So, if you're just doing beginner activities, it might go up a few points. If you're doing extremely difficult labs and exams, your skill score will increase much, much more. So just as a personal aside, it's just a great way to be able to, you know, motivate yourself, kind of watch your competency grow as you consume content on the platform. So definitely come here, check this out. If you do have questions about it, you can go to that knowledge base or reach out to us and we'll be happy to explain it a little bit further for you.

Now coming to the library, in the library you will find all of our content and you're going to be encountering a lot of this content within the blended learning. So just a really brief run through of what you're going to find. Anything is purple and is labeled a course is basically a container that will contain different other resources, whether they're video lessons, documents that you read through, exams or hands on labs. You can put all these in here for a comprehensive approach at a particular subject or in the case of like a certification preparation, everything that you would need to understand in order to pass that certification exam. It gives you the total amount of time that that content represents as well as your progress through it from there.

So, within those you will have lessons. These are the video lectures that convey all the information over to you. Hands on labs. These are pretty neat. I'm going to be going through a couple of these later on in the session. These are hands on guided exercises that occur in the actual platforms. So, if you're going through a Microsoft Azure exercise, we will give you credentials, a username and password. You log into the actual Azure platform, perform a series of tasks that we outline for you, and then our platform checks to see whether or not you did those correctly. If you didn't, you have to continue trying until you get it right. Otherwise, it'll pass you and you can move on to the next step.

We also have a second kind of lab called a Hands-on Lab Challenge, but in that case, it's more like a technical exam where we give you a task or a scenario to work through, but without the instructions. So you have to literally understand how to do it to get through it. And once you do, you feel really good about yourself because if you learn how to accomplish something there just to see how this content is presented to us in these containers.

So I opened up the AZ 900 Exam Preparation course. Here I can see a visual representation of all the types of content and the quantity of each type that’s inside of this course. Here I can see the total amount of time that all that content together represents, and I can see my progress through the course so far.

As you'd expect, very intuitive. You simply start at the top. As you finish each lesson or other content type, it kicks you on to the next one.

On and on and on through the entire list of resources until you get to the final exam, the final assessment or whatever may be waiting for you at the bottom there. This particular one happens to be a certification preparation exam. I will go over some of the features here momentarily, but first I wanted to go over our lessons and show you a couple of the things that we have in store for you and a couple of the features that are very, very useful.

So going into any of the lessons, video players, just as you would expect, you can adjust the speed if you want to get through a little bit more quickly or if the person speaking a little bit too quickly, you can reduce the speed as well. Here you can adjust resolution depending on your bandwidth. And we also have subtitles in five different languages. Every video does come with a full transcript. Every word spoken by the speaker is here. For me, I like to type out notes in a note taker, so I'll use the transcript to help amend those if I'm not able to keep up.

But one of the great things that we've added most recently sort of related to the transcript, you know, if you ever get stuck or want more clarity, you have access to Ela. And this is our AI powered learning assistant. She's available right here inside the platform and can help you understand the complex topics, breakdown instructions, provide additional context, all without having to leave the site. So think of Ella as kind of your on demand tutor. It's trained on Q as content. So everything that you're going to be exposed to and watching and reading here. So the answer is going to be relevant, accurate. They're going to be aligned to what you're studying. So whether you're confused about a technical step or just want a deeper explanation, Ela is there to support your learning any time that you need it. You can ask Ela to create a quiz based on this particular video. I can ask her to summarize this in two sentences and she'll come up with the answer. You can also ask in many different languages and she'll automatically respond in that particular language. So you can actually move back and forth depending on what area of the world that you're in from there. So a really, really cool feature. Definitely recommend exploring that and checking out and if you have any questions about it, you can always contact support or one of us and we will walk you through some of their what some of those capabilities.

At the end of every course there is an exam or an assessment. In this case this is a certification preparation exam that was at the end of the course I was demonstrating. You can take exams as many times as you would like. Each one does have a very large question bank associated with it, so you can take it multiple times with rarely seen repeat questions and they still remain challenging.

On the landing page for the exa, of course, you have all your requisite explanations and descriptions of what it is, etcetera. Here it shows you the required scores so you can have some targets to work toward and it also keeps track of every attempt that you have made in this demonstration. This person has failed quite a bit and we're going to go and look at one of those failed attempts.

At the very top here, now you see the amount of time spent, percentages of correct and incorrect, but you also see some really useful information here. I think we've divided the content up into technical areas and given you your score within those. So just at a glance, I can see that this person did very well in cost management and SLAs, but did very poorly in the identity, governance, privacy and compliance area. So, they really need to go through and spend some more time studying there. So, it really helps you focus where you are weak and go ahead and skip over or lightly review the places where you're really strong in that regard.

We also give you a full answer key. So, for every question, we show you what you got right or incorrect as well. Every question has an explanation of what the correct answer is associated with it.

At the beginning when we were on the dashboard in the bookmarks, I showed you the area for saved explanations. This is where you would bookmark those. So, for every incorrect question that I have here, I can come through and I can bookmark each one and create a little study list on my dashboard of all the areas or pieces of information I need to go back and review and study. And as I said before, each of these explanations has a link that goes to either content on our platform or will go to, in this case, it looks like it goes to Microsoft site for a white paper or an explanation there of a more technical breakdown of what that is. So really, really useful. I'd highly recommend saving these and keeping track of them because it'll really help increase your completion rate as you go through.

As I mentioned before, there are three different types of labs. There are the hands-on guided lab experience where we give you a set of instructions and guide you through all those steps throughout the entire experience. Then we have also lab challenges, which are more like a technical exam or technical test where we give you a scenario to work through or a problem to solve, but we do not give you any guidance or instructions. You have to literally understand how to do it before you move forward. And if you don't, you have to go back through the content and try to figure out how to do it from there.

But we're going to stick with the hands-on lab. Something I want to point out, it says beginner, it's up to an hour and a half. However, on average, students complete the lab in 20 minutes. So, this time for labs simply represents how long that particular session is allowed to run before it shuts down. So maybe a 20 to 30 minute long lesson. We give you more than enough time for things to provision for you to explore and read the instructions and everything else. So I just don't want anyone to think that this is how long the lab is actually going to take. And you'll probably get through these a little bit faster than you think you would.

I'm going to go ahead and start the lab. And there's a few things that are going to happen on the screen that I think requires some explanation. First, this is the timer shows you how much time is left in this session. When the timer runs out, it is dismantled, you are logged off and the lab shuts down. But you can do these labs as many times as you want. And as I said before, it's more than enough time.

Always make sure that the cloud environment is ready before you open it. Reason being this is setting up your session. It's creating whatever you're going to be interacting with your profile, whether it's your databases or networks, those kinds of things.

Once it's ready, you click on open and it will take you to the Azure login. We provide you with a username and password, so you never need to use your own password. You never need to use your own username, your own account. You don't have to use the account at work if you guys use Azure, and these are unique for every single session, so if it asks you to save the password I would recommend saying no or you're going to end up having 20 or 30 saved passwords and usernames. Simply copy and paste into the login field and you're good to go from there.

Once you're logged in, you click on Next and it will take you to your first set of instructions. For this particular lab, we have very detailed instructions. We have screenshots. Every once in a while, Microsoft may change something, so things may be slightly different, but it's basically the same. And once you're done entering the instructions, we have a validation check. So, this checks all your work within that platform within that session to make sure that you did it correctly. When you start the check, if you've done things correctly, it will turn green and you can proceed to the next step. Otherwise, it says failed. So you have to go back and you have to reread the instructions, study things to make sure that you understand what you may have done incorrect from there. So it's pretty easy, pretty simple. They're a lot of fun. And as I said before, you can do these labs as many times as you want. So have fun.

And then I wanted to show you the lab challenge. These are slightly different. A lot of it is the same, you know, you, you wait for the cloud environment to provision, you have your credentials here down at the bottom. But the difference is once you get to the instructions, you notice that there aren't any. It's simply a list of validations. So you have to go through and you have to read all the different things that you were asking you to do, and you have to go and do those on your own. Again, you come back and you start the check. These will turn green if you've done them. If they're not satisfied, it turns red. So really great exercise. You can test yourself to see how well you're absorbing the information. Sometimes the course that you're in will demand it. You'll have to pass the challenge as well as the exam in order to pass that particular course. So something to look out for.

So that is the very brief tour of the platform. If you do have any continuing questions or if you encounter things once you dive in that you may have a question about, come to the Help Center. You can contact support, but also just search in the Help Center. As I said, it's a really great knowledge base, answers most of your questions. You can find information about everything that you're looking at, how things work, and how things function, so I would definitely bookmark that and keep it handy.

Anyway, best of luck to you and we're here for any support or questions that you have. Thanks.

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