Ratings in Course Discription

I'm unsure of the meaning of the ratings in the course descriptions and am hoping that someone can explain the significance of them and how as a beginner I can make the best use of the the chess mentor and the rating system?

Thanks

Doug.

You can either

- Ignore the rating and go over the courses sequentially from the most basic.

- not work on courses that have a rating bar higher than your chess.com Online chess (turn-based) rating.

What is the Chess.com online rating mean and/or what is it used for?  Does this rating apply to other areas of the chess world outside of Chess.com?

The Online Rating in Chess.com measures:

- Your relative skill level at playing turn-by-turn (no faster than 1 move/day) chess. Unlike live chess, you have the option to:

a) Analyze / move the pieces around while the game is going on

b) Use Databases such as Chess.com's own game explorer to examine the theory/opening lines and how effective they are.

The Online Chess rating does not measure or automatically predict

- Your chess rating in actual "over-the-board' tournament chess at slow controls (such as ELO/FIDE and USCF)

- How good you will be at live games / faster time controls.

- How high/low your rating is on other chess servers or rating systems.

The only reasonable correlation one can make is that if one acquires a rating in the harshest test environments (Live face-to-face tournament chess), it will map to predictable performance at online chess ratings for the SAME time control.

Thank you.  That was very informative.