i think it'll probably be fine for an introductory course (but my opinion may not be valid because i haven't used that specific laptop, and haven't used blender in some time so it may have become more optimized)
looking at the specs.. its going to be slow. lack of RAM and VRAM in the gpu may be a limiting factor, so you may encounter crashes in more complicated scenes. Also ray-traced cycles engine will probably take a while to render.
but other than that it should work for a beginner course, perhaps not the most smoothly..
it'll definitely make a big difference upgrading from a more than 10 year old laptop though
Is my Lenovo T520 "enough" to run Blender? (i.imgur.com)
I have an introductory course and it's the only machine I have at hand.