Udemy Q&A Support Policy

First of all I want to thank you for taking my Udemy course.  Access is a fantastic tool and it’s my passion to get as many people productive with it as possible.  However, due to time constraints and other problems listed below, it is just no longer possible to answer questions in the Udemy Q&A on a student’s own database.

Udemy specifically states HERE that “The Q&A serves as a forum where students can engage each other and the instructor in conversations about the course content“ and also HERE that “Direct Messaging is a tool that students use to ask the instructor any questions about the course content.”

So Udemy’s policy is that instructors are only responsible for answering questions on the course content, not on a student’s own database. But often the big challenge with Access is making the leap from learning the course material to deciding how to implement what you’ve learned on your own database.

Knowing that, I would love to be able to answer all that students have on their own databases in detail, but there are a few problems with doing that:

  1. Just answering a question does not necessarily help students have a better understanding of Access.
  2. Sometimes a proper answer can be quite lengthy and should really include a video example.
  3. Often students work on their own databases while taking the courses (big mistake) and run into a problem that could be easily handled by course lessons they have not taken yet, so answering these questions is like encouraging them to not finish the course.
  4. This is the big one: Answers that I do provide are only seen by the student that asked the question and the few other students that may search for that answer in the Q&A. Most of these answers would benefit anyone who is trying to master Access, but they will never see them.

So what can I do? To be more effective in getting students to REALLY know Access, I have developed a community solution that solves all the problems listed above.  Supporting this community will now be my focus and I will be doing live video sessions each week to answer ALL questions that community members may have.

So I apologize for having to restrict my Udemy Q&A answers to the course material but, for people who really want to learn Access to a deep level, I believe that this is the solution.   

Other than that you could do Google searches and often this will bring up Microsoft’s documentation on various aspects of Access.  When I started consulting, this was about the only resource I had.  Ultimately, however, what I did to resolve problems was to create an example to test in Access and then test repeatedly and observe what happened.  

This approach takes time and patience and you have to learn to not get frustrated.  I can tell you though that, after years of doing this, you get pretty good at figuring things out and determining the details of how Access really works!

In any case I wish you success with your database and with Access in general!