After Effects can be a little bit intimidating to start out with. It helps to have an idea of what you'd like to make and then go from there. We recommend finding animations, motion graphics, or just general effects you enjoy and start to search from that point. You can also submit a request for a personalized tutorial through help.learninglab.xyz. But some of what you might find below can be used as a good jumping off point.
Here is LinkedinLearning's After Effects Essentials Guide
Brian Maffit and Will Freeman's tutorial on 'How to create a hoverboard effect'. In it, they teach how to mask video layers out in After Effects, and how to animate that mask as well. For their tutorial, they use the example of masking out the wheels on a skateboard as it goes down a sidewalk, making it look like a hoverboard instead. Though this particular example might not be needed for most academic purposes, the general ability to mask a moving object in a video is very useful, especially when using animation as story telling, or even when trying to remove distracting elements from video. The video is also useful to learn key-frame animation and motion-tracing in general, which could be applied to images or cameras, too, not just masks. Maffit and Freeman teach the concept simply and clearly, making the short 5-minute video very easy to follow.