Teaching for Impact: Designing Effective & Open Training
Part 1: Designing Training for Real-World Impact
Developed for the Failure Modes of Engineering (FeME) Project
Who we are
Anelda van der Walt
Sheena O'Connell
Anelda
- Senior eResearch Analyst @ University of Cape Town, South Africa
- Founder and director of Talarify
- Just enrolled for a PhD at the University of Pretoria, South Africa
- Involved in Research Software Engineering initiatives in Africa
- Have run 100s of workshops across Global South and Global North contexts
- Have offered some pretty bad training in my life...
- ...but always learning and really curious about how to bring about change through capacity and community development
Sheena
- Python Software Foundation Director
- Started coding as a young teen
- Mostly worked as a software engineer + lead
- Last 6 years: Tech (and adjacent) Education
- Theory of education => engineering of education
- Lots of education community involvement (PSF ed workgroup, guild of eds, education summit...)
- Prelude.tech = High quality advanced Python and soft skills training + EdTech engineering
Today's agenda
| Welcome & warm-up |
| Exercise 1: System Map |
| Exercise 2: Theory of Change |
| Exercise 3: Learner Reality Check |
| Mid-session synthesis |
| Break (20 min) |
| How people actually learn |
| Exercise 4: Learning Outcomes |
| Exercise 5: Designing an Activity |
| Closing reflection |
Before we start
- This is a working session, not a lecture
- You'll work in breakout rooms — with your own team and across teams
- Keep your own notes — outputs from each exercise feed into later ones
- 20 Break at half time
Please
- Keep your cameras on (even in breakout rooms)
- Raise your hand at any time to ask questions
Warm-up: Who's in the room?
In cross-team breakout rooms (3-4 people), introduce yourself briefly:
- Your name and role
- Who you are designing training for
- The skill or topic you want to teach
- What stage your training is at
Speaking order: alphabetical by Zoom name
7 minutes
What are you most excited or uncertain about?
Think silently for 1 minute about your training.
You will have a chance to share one thing you feel excited about or one thing you feel uncertain about.
Today's arc
We're working from the outside in:
- The system your training lives in
- The people you're training
- The outcomes you're designing for
- The activities that get learners there
Everything today uses your own training.
Training lives in a system
Think of a training that didn't work — yours or one you attended.
What went wrong?
Was it the conten... or something around the content?
It's rarely just the content
Exercise 1: System Map
10 min · Own-team breakout
- If you made a system map already, use that.
- If you don't: you can work on it now
- What insights do each of you have — fill gaps, challenge assumptions
- Push beyond the obvious:
- Who affects the training after learners leave?
- Which resources are fragile?
- What connections did no one spot alone?
Exercise 1: Debrief
One team presents their system map highlights
- Screen-share or talk through it (2 min)
- Everyone else: "What's missing? What connections do you see that the team might not?"
From system to strategy
You've mapped the terrain your training operates in.
Now: how does training actually lead to change?
How does training lead to change?
A team ran a short training on analysing climate and environmental data for decision-making.
Participants worked through real examples. They could complete the exercises. The tools seemed useful.
There was energy in the room — people were already thinking about how they would use this in their work.
Then they went back. BUT... nothing changed.
They ran the same training at multiple sites — but none of them changed how they worked.
Why?
Why training doesn't automatically lead to impact
A Theory of Change helps you map how training is expected to lead to change — and where that chain can break.
Links in the Theory of Change chain
- Impact — broader change
- Outcomes — what changes after training
- Outputs — what gets produced
- Activities — what learners do during training
- Inputs — what you invest
Each link depends on an assumption.
Where do assumptions sit?
These question marks are your assumptions.
If one fails, the chain can break there.
Exercise 2: Theory of Change
Phase 1 — Build your chain
10 min · Own-team breakout
- Start from Impact and work backwards
- Impact ← Outcomes ← Outputs ← Activities ← Inputs
- Get the chain on screen — one person sketches while the team talks
- Aim for a first draft that's concrete enough for someone else to read
Exercise 2: Theory of Change
Phase 2 — Where could this break?
2 min · Individual thinking
Look at your chain. Find the point where it depends on something uncertain.
- Where does this depend on something outside your control?
- Where are you making a hopeful guess?
- If this isn't true — does everything fall apart?
Write down one assumption that could break your training.
e.g. "Participants will have access to relevant data after the training"
Exercise 2: Quick Poll
Phase 3 - Assumptions under the spotlight
Which assumption is most likely to break your training?
Vote — then we'll unpack your choices together.
"If you don't design for these assumptions, your training may work — but nothing will change."
From logic to people
You've mapped the system and the logic.
Now we zoom in on the people.
Everything you design will land — or not — based on how well it fits the humans who show up.
Know your learners
We were teaching basic web development to women online. The instructions said "open a text editor" — and many participants didn't know what that meant.
We hadn't met the learners up front. We'd aimed at one level of computer literacy. A different audience showed up.
We spent weeks creating content, but an unexpected audience showed up
Five questions to ponder
Take 2 minutes of silent thinking before we go to breakout rooms.
- Who are you planning to train? Who is likely to show up?
- What do your learners already know or do that your training can build on?
- What is the single biggest barrier to their participation or success?
- What does "success" look like from their perspective — not yours, not the funder's?
- What else do you know about your learners as humans — what do they worry about, struggle with, or juggle?
Exercise 3: Learner Reality Check
10 min · Own-team breakout
- Work through the questions together
- Who are you planning to train? Who is likely to show up?
- What do your learners already know or do that your training can build on?
- What is the single biggest barrier to their participation or success?
- What does "success" look like from their perspective — not yours, not the funder's?
- What else do you know about your learners as humans — what do they worry about, struggle with, or juggle?
- What does this mean for the design of your training? Eg: are there barriers you can reduce or work around?
Exercise 3: Group discussion
- What barriers came up for you? How are you addressing them?
- What does success look like from the perspective of your learners? How are you getting them there?
Pause and transition
- What emerged this morning...
- You've mapped the terrain: system, logic, learners
- After the break: we start building — outcomes first, then activities
Break
Back at [TIME]
20 minutes
How people actually learn
Three principles that should shape every design decision you make.
1. Cognitive load
Working memory is smaller than you think.
- People can hold ~4 new items at a time
- Have you heard of the "Curse of Knowledge?"
- Intrinsic load — the genuine challenge of the material
- Extraneous load — confusion caused by your design
Your job: reduce extraneous load so learners can focus on what matters. What are some strategies?
2. Building long term memory
Memory is built when people pull knowledge out, not when you push it in.
- Recognising an answer ≠ being able to produce it
- The struggle of retrieval is the point, not a sign of failure
- Memorisation is usually not enough. Apply knowledge in a new context → deeper memory
3. Social learning
People learn by talking, arguing, and building on each other's ideas.
- Explaining something to someone else deepens your own understanding
- Peer challenge surfaces gaps you didn't know you had
- Structure matters — "discuss in groups" is not social learning
Quick show of hands
Who has heard of learning styles?
Eg "visual learner", "auditory learner", etc
The learning styles myth
If you're an "auditory learner," could you learn to drive a car by listening to someone talk about it?
If you're a "visual learner," could you learn to play guitar by watching videos?
The evidence doesn't support matching instruction to styles.
What works: varying how you engage learners — because different activities build different kinds of understanding.
So what should learners actually do?
Let's focus on what learners should be able to do after the training.
Learning Outcomes
Learning outcomes describe what learners will be able to do after the training, not what the training will cover.
This is your Theory of Change made concrete — where change becomes observable.
Take a moment to write down one learning outcome for your course
Don't overthink it. Let's use no more than 30 seconds.
Topic or Learning Outcome?
| Topic description | Learning outcome |
|---|---|
| Understand climate data | Interpret a local dataset to identify two practical risks and explain them to a non-specialist audience |
| Learn how to use QGIS | Use QGIS to create a map showing flood-prone areas in a local region and explain the key risk patterns |
| Understand how data informs decisions | Use a dataset to compare two response options and justify a recommended action based on the evidence |
Improve your outcome
2 min · Individual thinking
- Make it observable
- Add a clear action
- Make it realistic for your learners
Take your draft and improve it.
Exercise 4: Learning Outcomes
Phase 1 — Refine
5 min · Own-team breakout
- Share your revised outcomes
- Refine 1-2 outcomes together
- For each one, check:
- Is it observable?
- Does it use a clear action verb?
- Is it realistic?
Exercise 4: Design clinic
Whole-group critique
5 min · Whole group
- One team shares one draft outcome
- We make one specific improvement
- What would we actually see someone doing?
- Is this still a topic?
- Is it realistic?
Exercise 4: Debrief
Who has an outcome that shifted from vague to observable?
Read the original, then the revised version.
From outcomes to activities
You've written outcomes that describe what learners will do.
Now design the activity where they practise doing it.
An activity is not a topic.
It's something learners do during the training that lets you see whether they can perform the outcome.
Exercise 5: Start Designing an Activity
Phase 1 — Design
15 min · Own-team breakout
Pick one learning outcome from Exercise 4. Design an activity that helps learners achieve it. Or use one you already have
- Objective — which outcome does this address?
- Instructions — step-by-step, clear enough for another facilitator to run
- Output — what do learners produce? (something concrete)
- Materials — what do learners need?
- Participation — how is everyone involved, not just the confident ones?
- Time — how long, broken into stages
Exercise 5: Live share
Phase 2 — Discussion
15 min · Whole group
- 2-3 teams walk through their emerging design (3-4 min each)
- After each share:
- What's strong about this design?
- What would you want to think through further?
- What constraints should you consider? How might you need to adapt?
- What do the learners need to be able to do before they start this?
Why learning is harder than it looks
If understanding were enough — this should work.
Why didn’t it work?
- What actually happened?
- Why didn’t understanding translate into action?
- Where does this show up in your training?
- Where do learners understand during training — but still can’t do anything differently afterwards?
You've started something real
You don't need to finish it today.
The point was to experience what it feels like to design from outcomes — not from topics.
Take a moment to recognise what you've built so far.
The workbook will help you take this further, in your own time.
Closing reflection
- What is one thing you will do differently in your next training design?
- In one word — how do you feel about what you learned today?
Who would like to share?
A little homework
Find one resource that relates to your topic.
This could be:
- an article
- a video
- an existing training material
Don't overthink this — one is enough. You don't need something perfect!
Where to go from here
- The workbook goes deeper on every topic we touched today
- Activities you didn't get to — the workbook has them
- In Part 2 we will look at how to create open educational resources
The goal today was not to master all of this — it was to see the full picture and find the parts that matter most for your work.
Thank you
Teaching for Impact: Designing Effective & Open Training