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Without a teacher in the room there are a few important things that you need to be able to do
Structure
You are presented here with an enormous amount of material it's up to you to decide which of it you'll use and in what order. Some guides:
- Course structure. Go through the lessons consecuively, being careful not to move to the next until you feel confident that you've achieved the Lesson Outcomes.
- Lesson Structure. Most lessons contain more than one task, on top of that there are links to other resources, ebooks, youtube etc. How do you know which task to do? It'll depend on on how much time you have, where your strengths and weaknesses are etc but to make an informed decision remember the gold rule: One Thing At A Time. The early lessons will contain detailed study plans that outline how much time to spend on each task, once you've done a few you'll be able to construct your own study plans.
Feedback
There's no point practicing the wrong thing, if you wanted to do that you'd still be punishing yourself with random YouTube videos. You know that you're doing something right when you get feedback on your playing and there are two ways that can happen:
- Extrinsic feedback is when someone else tells you what you are doing correct or incorrect. This is commonly received by teachers in a face-to-face session so when learning online we are forced to rely on video lessons, social media and other forms of communication. It's never as direct as being in the room with someone but we can get close.
- Intrinsic feedback is the feedback that you give yourself. This is harder to obtain but once you've got it much more effective. If you can become competent enough to know yourself that you're doing something right, or doing it wrong for that matter, you've made a significant step in your learning. Because we rely so much on Intrinsic feedback when learning online there are many ways here that you can develop this important skill. The most important is naming up your objectives in every learning session. If you know what you are trying to achieve you have a much better chance of achieving it. Look carefully at the objectives of each lesson, take time to write a journal or Blog, work on one thing at a time and recognise the sequence of skills that you're building, relax and listen to what your body and your ears are telling you.