Hi Steve! Thanks for your excellent post. You hit it on the head as to the crucial importance of the introduction. It, as you said, provides a map of the topics and activities as well as clarifies resulting learning outcomes and expectations...sets the stage. We have seen many instructors just jump right into the lesson at hand and students get lost in the process. One interesting best practice: we had one instructor at the beginning of class, as part of the introduction, ask students what they believed was important to know about the topic/concept/procedure. He wrote responses on the board and then matched learning objectives to them (plus adding where needed). This encouraged students to buy-in to the relevance as the class proceeded. The instructor also, during the introduction, related the lesson to both previous outcomes and future objectives in sort of a building block approach. I'm sure your instructors also do a summary at the end of class. I used to have students keep a journal, then the last five to ten minutes of class write a brief summary of the day's lesson(s) content/activities, any questions or confusion they may have, and how they could apply the outcomes directly to the workplace. This created an ongoing pulse of student mastery of information and application. As you proceed through the course, please take a look at the additional forum questions that I posed to one of the other students (under discussion). I would be interested to here some of your instructors' best practices. I'll be sending you a touch base email separately, thanks...