TL;DR: Take notes and change code.

Video Courses are all out there in dev-land. And to be honest, most of them are really great. Nearly every dev in the world knows (or at least has heard of) Wes Bos, Scott Tolinski, Brad Traversy or Florin Pop. Just to name a few of the great teachers out there.

For me, video courses always help me to get into a new topic. They help me to learn new stuff or to get a different point of view on things I already use.

But too often, I forgot the great things I learned really fast. And if I didn't forget things, I wasn't able to bootstrap a project on my own after the course.

The tips you get here are no secret. Most instructors tell you in the course about those tips as well. But if you are a bit like me, chances are, you ignored them.

So, if you have the same problems, here are the two obvius, not secret tips on how to use video courses best, that really helped me out.

Take notes

This tip is so simple, it feels like cheating. But yet, it is very effecitve.

First, when you take notes, you have to focus on the course and the code. Taking notes beside coding is hard work and the course might take longer, because you will have to pause. But you won't get distracted so easily by your phone, reddit, ...

When taking notes on subjects, you have to think about what you learned and write it down. And while reflecting and using your own words, you use a lot of brain-juice. And our brain is not stupid - when thoughts need a lot of brain-juice to produce, they count as important. And it is harder to forget them then.

You also get a document to look things up later on, which might be helpful. You could even turn those notes into a blogpost as well.

Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.

Most of the times, you will build a small project in your video course.

Make this project your own.

You can change names, colors, contents and even some components while developing.

This way, you wont just be the person re-typing all the stuff you see, but you will have to think about all the things on your very own as well.

If you don't want to change things while the course is running, you should add some new features to the project afterwards. Add those rankings to your minigames!

Another cool thing is to build something completely new based on the things you learned. You just built a knowledge-database? Fine! Now build a music-database on your own! (Not the best examples, I know... )

If you have problems with your new features, get out on Stack Overflow, Twitter or ask a friend. When talking about your problems and your code, you will learn even more.

Conclusion

Those tips seem to be really obvious. Of course they seem, because they really are.

But when doing courses, I tend to be distracted. Taking notes keeps my focus where it should be - on the course. I also have notes, that I can look up later and I learn better when writing things down.

And in fact, you learn better, when you build stuff on your own. If you adapt your course project - in the course or later, you will have to think about what to do next. This way, you will get better at starting your own projects.