i was beyond pleased to see TheCyberMentor Security Academy (TCM-A) release some free courses! specifically, the help desk course grabbed my eye, as landing that position is part of my roadmap to a job in cybersecurity. i was super eager to see what approach they took with IT fundamentals and how they planned on making things hands-on. the latter is something I'm missing when it comes to studying for the A+ with Professor Messer's lecture series.

the course is broken into 15 sections, including the intro and outro chapters. each section is made up of video lectures, where the teacher (Andrew Bellini) shows you either the hardware components, the application, or a slideshow and accompanying diagrams. in these sections there are also two extra opportunities for more involved learning.

i love my notetaking, but as mentioned in "Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning" by Roediger III, Brown, and McDaniel, exclusively taking verbatim notes and re-reading them is NOT an optimal learning strategy. instead, there needs to be exercises displaying active recall (amongst other principles, which warrant a separate blog post!). by getting the student to put in effort to pull the knowledge they have consumed from their brain, that they can get even better return-on-investment from their study sessions.

there are quizzes at the end of sections, as well as these videos called "Ticket Interrupts". Andrew brings up a mock help-desk ticket outlining a situation/problem and the student has to come up with their steps to a solution -- preferably before Andrew shares his solution! remember: effort from the student is IMPORTANT.

there are definitely sections and videos where you will be following along in your own lab and getting hands-on reps that way, but i really wanted to emphasize my appreciation for these other forms of engagement with the material. if anything, i would've loved to see longer quizzes or more ticket interrupts!

i won't dive into every single section, but i thought they did a great job of covering your bases, and it even overlapped with the A+'s learning objectives too. hardware, virtualization, operating systems, security, and even more were covered in TCM-A's help desk course.

also, i really appreciated their willingness to get a little bit deeper into some of these topics, like how CPUs and RAM work. this is something that wasn't touched on in the A+ material i've seen. you can see Bellini's teaching effort here on display, since he didn't need to include anything about, for example, logic gates and how electricity turns into computationally useful values, but he did anyway, as he believed it would help the student understand higher level concepts down the line. real great (and nerdy) stuff!

something else i appreciated about this course is that there is no cloud-based VM like on HackTheBox (HTB) or TryHackMe (THM). at first glance, that sounds like it just has one less perk, but for me, it really forced me to get involved with my own lab set-up. in fact, it's inspiring me to invest in a bare metal VM home lab in the near future! there's something about setting your own environment up that has you care more than just starting up an instance of PwnBox, but maybe that's just me.

two parts of the course i really liked that i hadn't encountered elsewhere yet were the Peppermint ticketing software and setting up my own domain controller with Active Directory! of course I'm going to support open source software (OSS) when I can, and it was a nice way to play with a ticketing application. it's easy to sit there and go "I don't need to follow along or do the exercise, I know how to click buttons, blah blah blah" BUT i truly think there is something to be gained by intentionally going through the steps and getting reps anyway.

the Active Directory portion follows that same theme, where it sounds and looks simple enough, but going through it yourself is important and worthwhile nonetheless! i had a nice little dopamine bump when doing the simple things like hooking up my Windows 11 VM to Windows Server 2022, or changing a user's password through the GUI AND through a PowerShell script. it's the little things in life man.

all in all, I really appreciated this course, and it even resulted in me taking advantage of TCM's black friday sale and investing in their paid tier. (should be obvious, but not sponsored to say this haha. i wish.) i'm looking forward to continuing to use their educational resources to get further on this journey into the cybersecurity world!