I've tried to follow the KX Academy Dashboad course step by step. However, I failed rather early when trying to connect the first data source to a component. It seems that there is no kdb+ instance running locally on the configured port.
I had this issue with the standalone KX Dashboard version 2.20 as well as the latest delta platform. My KX enviroment is fully licenced, so I don't use the trial version as suggest in the academy course.
The connection to a custom q instance running locally works.
Sorry to hear you're having trouble with the dashboards course.
Q should be running in the background. Depending on whether you're using Windows or Linux, you would be starting a q session either through the dash.bat file or by running
q dash.q -p 10001 -u 1
If your dashboards are already running, i.e. through your licensed product you will probably need to use your local q instance.
You can read more about getting started with dashboards here: Standard Deploy