# Memorizing video courses from COURSERA with GMS Phenomanal Memory **URL:** \ **Category:** General Memory Chat\ **Tags:** gms\ **Created:** [June 23, 2022, 3:41pm UTC](https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/memorizing-video-courses-from-coursera-with-gms-phenomanal-memory/74593 "2022-06-23T15:41:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Bogdanm](https://forum.artofmemory.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/b/9de053/32.png) [@Bogdanm](https://forum.artofmemory.com/u/Bogdanm)\ **Post date:** [June 23, 2022, 3:41pm UTC](https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/memorizing-video-courses-from-coursera-with-gms-phenomanal-memory/74593/1 "2022-06-23T15:41:47Z")
Hello, I have yet again another question for those of you who have done the GMS Phenomenal Memory program. I want to do it as well I started once and got to about lesson 15 but I want to do it again. I’ve been looking through the lessons and I wasn’t able to find out how to memorize courses that are videos like the ones on COURSERA. Can someone give me a little technical detail on how it`s done to ace any kind of tests or questions from employers regarding that course? What exactly do you do? Do you let the video go through watch it a couple of times take notes and then memorize your notes as you would a normal book? Or do you go through it a couple of times through the video and then you will have memorized it all? How do you do it? Is it a good method to go through the video once write down the essentials and then memorize those essentials and then go about and take the tests and so forth? Thank you very much ---
**Author:** ![Josh](https://forum.artofmemory.com/user_avatar/forum.artofmemory.com/josh/32/21_2.png) [@Josh](https://forum.artofmemory.com/u/Josh)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2022, 8:31pm UTC](https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/memorizing-video-courses-from-coursera-with-gms-phenomanal-memory/74593/2 "2022-07-05T20:31:14Z")
> [@Bogdanm](#): > > how it’s done to ace any kind of tests or questions from employers regarding that course? I’m not familiar with GMS, and I don’t watch much Coursera, but I can help brainstorm some ideas. ### Practice Tests Can you find any sample tests? It might be worthwhile to gather up as many example questions as possible from the tests and try to work backwards. If those aren’t available, try to find what you will be tested on. A quick search turned up some pages like this: - [Exam 70-778: Analyzing and Visualizing Data with Microsoft Power BI - Certifications | Microsoft Learn](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/70-778) - [https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE4tnJB](https://query.prod.cms.rt.microsoft.com/cms/api/am/binary/RE4tnJB) When you’re studying you can recognize whether something will be on the test and be able to spend extra time on it. ### Videos One problem with courses, tutorials, and videos is that they are passive. It’s kind of like [paint-by-numbers](https://www.pinterest.com/pin/50172983340358334/), where someone else has created the artwork and they are just telling you where to put the colors. When you’re starting out, paint-by-numbers can be useful, but if you want to be a painter, then you have to get experience going through the entire process of making a painting from scratch over and over. So I do a few things to try to make videos more interactive and less like paint-by-numbers: If I’m watching something on YouTube or Udemy, I’ll watch a section (usually at 2-3x speed using [this Firefox extension](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/videospeed/)). Then I’ll look away and try to explain the section to an imaginary student. (See “[Feynman Technique](https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Feynman_Technique/)”.) I might type out the code while explaining it. That helps me make sure I know the material — if I can’t explain something in my own words, then I probably didn’t understand it. I also sometimes try to predict where the video is going. The instructor will say “here’s what we’re going to do next”, and before they show how to do it, I’ll stop the video and code it out **before** they explain it. Then I’ll continue the video and see if I got it right. If there are short lists of things to remember, I’ll use a [peg list](https://artofmemory.com/wiki/Mnemonic_Peg_System/) or [memory palace](https://artofmemory.com/wiki/How_to_Build_a_Memory_Palace/). I’m not familiar with Power BI, but I observe a lot of people while they study programming and technical topics, and I think the fastest way to learn is to practice on your own projects. The slowest way to learn is to _only_ follow tutorials and get certifications without building projects from scratch. * * * In that PDF from Microsoft (above) it says they are going to test you on this: > connect to databases, files, folders; import from Excel; connect to SQL Azure, Big Data, SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) What I would do there is practice those tasks away from the course or tutorial. The first item is “connect to databases, files, folders”. To work on that part, I would make 3 small personal projects. One project uses a database, one project uses a file, and another project uses a folder of files. As soon as you can successfully load the data and perform a simple operation on it, then the project is finished. I’d start from scratch each time, so it’s going to be repetitive, but that’s the point. The repetition is so that doing those basic tasks becomes automatic and effortless. In the bigger scheme of things, a course itself is often not important — all that really matters is if you can perform the tasks that the course promises to teach. I don’t know if that helps, but it’s what works for me.