 In this first section we'll introduce the course, talk a little bit about how the course is organized, and walk through the course agenda and structure. First let's talk about the organization of the course. We'll talk a little bit about how the course comes together, sets some expectations, and prepare you a little bit for your study and journey in preparing for COVID-5 certification. This particular program prepares you for COVID-5 Foundation certification, or preparing you for a core understanding of how COVID is utilized to provide governance and management oversight in ensuring alignment between IT and the business. There are follow on programs becoming available for implementation support for consultants and practitioners who are going to be asked to work with their organizations or with third party organizations to implement COVID-5, as well as assessor roles who are going to provide appropriate process assessments and process capability determinations in support of the process capability models. As part of taking part in the COVID-5 course, you are eligible to join our LinkedIn community. If you go to My Groups in LinkedIn, you can join a group called MyITSM Mentoring Community, and that will provide you access to information as well as resources for other students preparing for COVID-5 certification. Take the opportunity to introduce yourself, create a profile, and share information about yourself and why you're taking the COVID-5 Foundation's course. Obviously, in addition to meeting other students on the journey, there will be other resources out there as well that will help you in your preparation. One of the things you need to do in preparing to take part in this program is to be clear with yourself about why you want to take advantage of and learn what the COVID-5 has to offer for you. How are you going to use this information to do a better job of aligning governance and management of enterprise and IT goals and objectives? How are you going to engage in your own learning experience, plan your schedule for going ahead and getting through the training programs, reading the COVID materials, and preparing appropriately for the certification? There are lots of places in this course where your practical experience working in IT will help you in understanding, for example, how the various processes are gathered and organized in support of information technology capabilities. This course should specifically help you identify certain key things you want to try to do better to help your organization improve its governance and management. And one of the things I hope that each of you will find are specific opportunities for you to benefit in your own jobs and in the work that you're preparing to do by taking advantage of what the COVID skills give you. As you get ready to begin with the course, one of the things I'm going to encourage you to do is not to just listen to it the way you might listen to a radio show in the morning. It's very, very important for you to actively engage in the course, take advantage of and use your study materials, print out a copy of the COVID and read it carefully yourself, and then feel free to use the mentoring community, your fellow students, and your instructor to ask and answer questions about the material that you're reading because people learn in different ways. And we want to make sure that you not only get through the course, but that you get the key information that you need to be successful. In getting ready to take this program, there are a few things that I'm going to encourage you to do. Even though an online program allows you to be very flexible in how you take the training, it's very important to establish a consistent schedule and to stick to that the same way you might if you were attending a regular instructor-led class. Take the time to create and keep that schedule, and then treat it in many ways the same way you would an instructor-led class, being able to give yourself time for breaks, take meal breaks when you need to do so, and try wherever possible to minimize interruptions and disruptions. Try to turn off your cellular phone, communicate to your colleagues or to your family that you really need to concentrate on the things that we're working on together here and that you need to not be interrupted for that period of time so that you can dedicate your focus to working on the COVID. At the end of each of our major units, we're going to offer you the opportunity to do an end of unit quiz. This quiz is going to help you verify that you've mastered those particular learning objectives and is very, very tightly aligned to the key things you must learn in preparation for the COVID-5 exam. Likewise, we'll have additional exercises through the program, as well as a full sample examination for you to take in preparation for your COVID-5 exam. Now speaking of the exam, we should probably take a few minutes to talk about the foundation's examination. It is a closed book multiple choice exam. There are 50 questions in the exam and you have about 40 minutes to complete the exam. The exam requires a 50% score to pass. That means 25 out of 50. And if you want to be able to teach this program in the future to others, you requires a minimum of 33 out of those 50. The COVID-5 foundations is a prerequisite for all future advanced COVID certifications. So it's very important that you earn your COVID-5 foundation to give yourself openings for opportunities in the future. As you prepare for your online program, again, it's very important to have a coherent and consistent study plan. When you're going to do the e-learning, when you're going to do the reading, when you're going to read the COVID, and how you use the materials together to support your learning program. You're never going to learn the program just from listening to me or just from reading the COVID or just from reading your course manual. It's really a combination of all of those things taken together that will make you successful. It's very important within each of the major chapters to take the time to review the learning objectives, understand the terms and concepts, which may be different than the way your organization describes them today. In particular, the COVID is very specific about the use of many terms like processes, practices, activities, and detailed activities. And it's very important to understand exactly what they mean when they use certain terminology. As you're working through each of the sections, take the time to read and understand the learning objectives. When you have questions, please join the online mentoring community. Bring your questions there so we have an opportunity to support you. Take the time to do the end of section quizzes and the practice examination, and that will help you determine very much what the real exam is going to be like. I think you'll find that the sample exam is very representative of the kinds of questions that you're likely to see on the real test.