This course will look in the fundamentals of modeling in Maya with an emphasis on creating good topology. It's aimed at people that have some modeling experience in Maya but are having trouble with
complex objects.
Yeah, sure is. I'd go about it with animation snapshot.
1) Select you curve and the sphere
2) Animate->MotionPaths[]
3) Check the "Start/End" option for Time Range
4) Set the EndTime to the number of objects you'd like
5) Hit attach
6) Animate->Create Animation Snapshot[]
7) Set the EndTime to the same value used in #4
8) Hit apply.
There's plenty more to all the options than that, but it should be enough to get you started. I picked up the techniqe from one of the vid tutes at Mike McKinley's site.
There's also a tute on making a dynamic domino scene. In that case, curves are used to set the initial position of the dominos set to fall over, while animation snapshot is used to instance them all.
Mike's is very good, but if bandwidth is limited, it's about 44Mb and the domino one is only 781kb.
EDIT: Have attached the domino tute. Needs WinRar 3.61