Quote from admin on December 31, 2023, 5:07 pm

Welcome

My hope in creating this online class is to give teams the ability to work where they are currently at and continue to grow and fine tune their rally obedience skills. This is a foundation class but there is a significant amount of room for varying skill levels. Without appropriate and clean foundation skills you will only get so far in your rally journey. This class is built to focus on your teams skills; so that you can in turn, put those skills together when practicing rally courses. Note that because of this there may be many things your team is not quite ready for – these lectures come from my regular 4 week in person lessons. My normal four week lessons will be condensed into a one week information dump. Work where your team is at, pushing forward to try and finish it “all” will only end up with holes in your foundation. 

Working Students Guidelines –

You will notice your name and your dogs name on their own forum. This is your own thread and only you and I will be communicating on this forum. Everyone else is welcome to view it to follow along but to keep this conversation easy to follow I ask that only you comment on this forum. Any other comments will be deleted to keeps the conversation and feedback between you and I.

Video Guidelines –
Please ensure your videos are done in landscape rather than portrait (wider than it is tall). This usually gives a bit more view and ensures your videos are uploaded as actually video’s on YouTube and not automatically made into Reels (we don’t want that to happen). A tripod can make things easier but you can use many household things to prop your phone up while videoing.

I recommend you keep your videos shorter than 2 minutes. The shorter your videos are the more detailed and thorough my feedback can be. I also suggest you only show one or two skills you are working on per video. The more skills and a longer video will decrease the quality of your feedback as my job is to help build you up and correct imperfections. Because of this I will not want to overwhelm you with a ton of feedback on a longer video and will in turn only pick one or two things to pick out of a longer video for you to start with. This will decrease your quality of feedback and might not yield the help you were really looking for.  When videoing for feedback please note that you want to show me where you are struggling. I know this isn’t the easiest for many people – and I assure you I love seeing your successes also but for the best practice of learning I can help you significantly more if you show me a short video of where you are struggling. Working Students have a maximum of 6 minutes per week to use for video feedback. This should give you plenty but please choose these clips wisely. Your video time will reset to 0 once the next weeks lesson is posted on the Lecture thread – if you go over your 6 minutes I’ll ask that you repost that if you want feedback once your video time is reset.

Please post only one video and/or question at a time. Focus on one or two skills so that we can both understand and work where you need / want at that moment. Once posted please wait until I have responded to your post. This is very important as it ensures I do not miss a post/questions from you and it creates a good flow for communication and growth.

YouTube:
If you do not have one already, please sign up for a free YouTube account. This is where you will be uploading your videos. From there you can share a link and post in your own threads for feedback. When you upload your videos, you must keep them as ‘Unlisted’ (no one will be able to find these unless you share the link) or ‘Public’ (these will be viewable by anyone who may stumble upon your YouTube account). If you make the video ‘Private’ we will not be able to view it via the link – please ensure it is either unlisted or public.

Auditing Students Guidelines – Auditing students will have access to a few different threads. A General Question thread will be read / answered to the best of my ability. If a question is posted that is extremely specific, I will do my best to give you a general answer. To help ensure this is valuable to everyone and understanding that I will not be viewing your teams work I am asking to keep questions general.  For example, questions should not start “my dog ….” And should be something like “what if a dog turns the opposite way that I want”. The Positive feedback thread is exactly as it sounds. Did a working team do something you thought was really neat or cool? Another auditor asks a question that helped you out? Those things can go there.
Though you will not be sharing video, I do suggest you still video and review your own training sessions. This will help immensely with handling skills and seeing errors before they become a harder to change pattern.

I ask that you only read and do not comment/post on working student threads. Any posts that are not from that specific working student will be deleted. 

Feedback – I will be checking the forums every 48 hours at minimum. Due to my schedule being a bit all over the place I can not promise it will be at a uniform time every day. Note – I am only human, if I somehow miss your thread please just message me and I will get to you as soon as I can. I can assure you if this happens it will just be an unintended oversight.