One thing i would like to see added to cgcookie is written material. At the moment everything is video. I would live it if the teachers would also include a pdf or something that sums up some important points. I find it a bit hard to find back in the videos where an important topic has been discussed. Of course we can write down things ourselves, but if it comes from the teacher we won't miss what he finds important
I know what the answer will be. Producing courses is ultra time consuming and teachers are too busy creating new material all the time and researching new Blender features so they can teach us and we can be up to date and all that good stuff. There has been PDF's produced before and the time that goes into it for the number of downloads and all that jazz is not worth the time that goes into it. So in the end, it's up to us the students to make our own way to keep track of what we think matters most on our learning path. Man I can be a politician now.
You could utilize the notes function on each video to mark important sections. It let's you add a timestamp too.
I would think that in preparation for a course they already have a structure on paper?
Sascha has a point, i forgot about the written subtitles
True, the subtitles work too. But I was more referring to the notes you can add yourself:
Yeh, but that is just what i as a student pick out at the moment. It might not be what the teacher thinks is important. With another course i wrote out every word from the lessons that i thought i had to remember and in the end there was a test and the questions where not at all about what i thought was important
I remember having a brief conversation with Wes via email about timestamps being added to videos to more easily find information - This was around the start of last year. He said it's a bit cumbersome to setup but it was something he was playing with. I haven't watched any recently released course videos, but I think I saw that it was added to a couple of the Core courses?
On the note of specific important things like hotkeys, functions, and all that jazz; With the rate at which Blender gets new updates, it would be a conglomerate job to keep an updated pdf - There was a post here on the community forum some time ago about this and I think 
dillenbata3 had some good points on it.
Some courses, Wayne's videos for example, do have a number of summarising notes underneath the video player, however, they are very summarised - they're more like quick bullet points. He's evidently a busy bee and might just not have the time to provide written rundowns for each video.
I myself do sympathise with wanting written summaries for important points, yet it might be a worthwhile idea to start using the notes section and include the timestamps to come back to it (I didn't even know this existed until now, so I'm definitely going to try it.) I can also sympathise with trying to identify the really important points, or those that the instructor deems most important. For the time being though, a way to approach this might be to add a note with a topic keyword and include the timestamp so that way you can quickly glanse through your notes.
dostovel might it be possible to ask the cookies in the sky to plant an idea for a notes function that can be found on a course's landing page? It could work like the existing notes function, but also include which chapter and video the note was created in. That way it might be easier to find the notes that a user has written across multiple videos at once - as opposed to having to sift through each video to find specific notes.
Ultimately however, the best way to learn (or at least what has been working succesfully for me) is by putting things into practice outside of the tutorials - or at least alongside the tutorials. Generally speaking, I found that copying the tutorials one for one wasn't working out, but by making something a little different to what is being made by the instructor, it forces you to think about what we're learning while consciously applying it to something else. I guess by putting things into practice, you start to recognise which points are important.
Anywho, sorry, got on a bit of a tangent there. But yeah, I think dostovel made a good point by in which the instructors way well unfortunately have a fair bit on their plates, and that it's up to us as the students to work out what information we want to stick in our brains. Also ty SFE-Viz I'm definitely going to try using the notes function!
I have never taken notes while watching a course, I usually know where to go back to if I have to refer to something I forgot, but if I were to keep notes, I'd do it on some app that was specifically design for it, on my phone or computer. I don't think CG Cookie would be able to invest on a full fledged functionality for that on the website, I bet their thinking always is, better to invest that in our bread and butter and make even more fun tutorials and hire good teachers. But I'm just guessing really. Though for sure a restaurant if they have limited budget, priority should be in the kitchen and chef's.
Yeehawcowboyletsgo agree with what you said about the time stamps. Well as long as it doesn't exist I'll just have to make my own notes.
