Partnering with Educatefran

I recently celebrated one year of collaborating with Frances O'Donnell, an instructional designer who works hundreds of kilometers from my home base in County Tipperary, Ireland. We have created original learning material and trained dozens of mid-career professionals during over-booked sessions in three European countries. I have learned several efficiencies along the way worth sharing.

Scoping Sessions and Focal Points

We had an audience demographic. technology footprint, and microlearning toolkits in mind before we scoped out details for training events. In every activity we've attempted, we started with casual conversations (sometimes while walking in a corridor) that coalesced into agenda items during 45-minute Zoom sessions.

Because we followed agendas, we could flesh out main points that our automated transcript services would summarise in outline formats that we could use to build hands-on workshops attended by educators from all levels and disciplines.

I use Obsidian as a vault for my thoughts. During meetings and after transcripts are rendered, I use my Obsidian (public view of some of the content) to tick off items acconmplished.

I sincerely believe that if I relayed parts of my Obsidian to Frances, we would be able to share development notes as they originated. In the screen capture above, the violet underscores open related materials that I often use as bullet points of Powerpoints.

Delivering the Training

We review a set of slide decks with embedded videos before we train people. We want to avoid problems so we try to load slide decks on a laptop we bring to a session or onto a computer that is part of the venue's projection system. We arrive early to see if our embedded videos can play inside the venue or if we need to pre-load local video files onto the local machines.

Because people want to run slide decks on their own, often after the training session concludes, we offer QR codes to the original materials in a public Google Drive.

The files inside Google Drive earn a lovely representation as part of a public website powered by Notion. Both Notion and Obsidian host original content we have produced for delivery at workshops.

We hand out printed material during our workshops that show an outline of the training programme, QR codes for specific high value content, and overhead questions everyone should be able to answer at the end of the training.

If you want to see what the finished product looks like, please contact us directly on Bluesky. Our handles are educatefran and topgold.