Three things to do in the week before Week 1 opens. None are heavy. All save time later.
Identify the four-to-six hour weekly window for the next fourteen weeks. Mark it in your calendar as protected. Tell the people who would otherwise schedule into those windows that you have a course commitment.
The most common cause of falling behind in a self-paced course is calendar drift; the fix is calendar discipline, applied early. Two morning blocks works. One long afternoon works. The shape matters less than the consistency.
The Domain Audit Map (Week 1) and the scope work (Week 2) work best when applied to a specific AI-enabled communication service. Some participants come to the course with the service already in mind (the patient portal, the customer remediation communications system, the agency's new public information platform, the donor communications system, the crisis-response microsite). Some do not.
If you are in the second group, spend thirty minutes before Week 1 considering which service in your domain is the right candidate. Three questions help. First, where is AI activity already present in a way that matters? Second, where is the governance gap most operationally significant? Third, what would benefit most from the work the course produces: audit-readiness, vendor commissioning, or a board-defensible specification?
If nothing comes to mind by Week 1, do not worry. Most participants discover the right service during Week 1 itself, as the Domain Audit Map surfaces what is actually happening across the six surfaces.
The audit work in Week 1 reveals more AI activity than most teams have named, less governance than most teams have assumed, and more regulatory exposure than most teams have mapped. This is a feature of the work, not a problem with the participant. The framework calibrates to the gap between what is happening and what is governed. Naming the gap is the first defensible move.
Be willing to record an honest audit, including the uncomfortable parts. Specifications built from honest audits hold up under scrutiny. Specifications built from optimistic audits fail when they meet a real audit.
The work compounds. Week 5 references Week 1 and Week 2. Week 8 references Week 6 and Week 7. A week skipped is a reference missed, which makes the following weeks harder, not easier. The single best predictor of finishing well is calendar discipline early.