For this month’s deliverable, I chose to peer review and build out additional sections for the Audacity training. After going through the training again and thinking about what would actually help future Fellows, I added three new sections — keyboard shortcuts, troubleshooting, and file format guidance.
The keyboard shortcuts section is basically a cheat sheet organized by task type so you can quickly find what you need. The troubleshooting section covers all those annoying beginner problems like your mic not being detected or audio sounding muffled. And the file formats section explains when to use MP3 versus WAV and what all those bitrate settings actually mean.
Writing these taught me that creating training materials is way different from just knowing how to use a tool. You have to think about where people will get stuck and explain solutions in a way that’s actually helpful. I tried to keep everything straightforward without being too technical, which was harder than I expected. It took me much longer than I expected.
I’m still not totally sure if the sections I wrote are too long, but my supervisor liked them, so hopefully they’ll be helpful for future Fellows working on podcasts or oral history projects!