Introduction

Last month I ended the report by saying:

And that’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot the last month or two: what are we trying to achieve here? I hope to present a fairly comprehensive plan to answer that question in my next full report.

So this report will be covering both the plan and the people who are going to help implement it. However, before we get into that, I want to share some numbers with you. From when I took over in September through the end of January, we averaged 41 manually graded exams and 120 site-graded exams per month. In February, the staff graded 150 exams with dbb0t handling another 520. Crysenia alone graded 44 exams. So I want to give a quick shout out not only to the DB community for diving into the SA last month, but especially to our Professors who maintained a remarkably quick turnaround despite a massive and unexpected increase in their workloads.

Game Plan

So I think there’s two things we need to keep in mind when we think about the Shadow Academy.

First, nobody joined this club looking for a school. Everybody hates their mandatory annual training on safety or security at work, and the last thing they want to spend their leisure time on is more of that stuff just to unlock a swarm of microdroids.

Second, members say, implicitly or explicitly, that they want to learn and improve constantly. They say that they’re confused or overwhelmed by parts of the club. They’re hesitant to participate in some things because they don’t feel competent or prepared. They wish they could write or draw like some of our other members. And most of our members love this club and Star Wars and want to know them better.

So the challenge we face is how do we meet that need without just giving people another thing they have to suffer through?

Nailing down a vision, turning it into details, and then communicating all that clearly is a challenge. So let’s start with some basic principles.

First Principles

Principle 1: The SA is at its most valuable when it helps make club activities easier for members and/or makes members better at club activities.

Principle 2: Courses must be current and relevant to add value.

Principle 3: Exams exist to reinforce key points from the course notes and provide a basic validation that the member read them. The value is in the course notes, not whether or not a member was “good enough” to pass an exam. There is an exception here, in that a few courses are really opportunities for coaching and feedback, e.g. the Test of Wisdom. But that’s different from making someone invent a starship or answer 40 questions about alchemical fanon.

Principle 4: Courses that simply repeat content already available on the DJBWiki or Wookieepedia do not add value.

Principle 5: The SA does not exist in a vacuum and should proactively support other Brotherhood systems, including but not limited to possessions, the CS system, and societies.

Principle 6: We need to maintain roughly the current number of courses and degrees to support the Aurora Collegium, and it would be better to have a few more Savants and Sages so that members have actual choices in how they advance to rank XII.

Specific Initiatives

So keeping those six principles in mind, what does my ideal Shadow Academy look like?

Every course should be directly related to something you do in this club. Every course should teach you something that makes your participation in that activity easier or better.

I want quick, easy guides to show members how to use the basic tools they need to be a happy and active member of the club. Our current DB Fundamentals department is not perfect, but I think it largely achieves this goal.

I want a set of courses that cover all of the many skills that leaders in this club need to be effective, especially since almost nobody comes in with all of them. We have some of that already. We have good courses on how Markdown and Wiki markup work, but we need something on Discord administration. We need courses on how to not only create competitions, but run good ones. We need to find the best leaders in the club, collect what makes them so effective, and pass that knowledge on.

I want to replace courses that just regurgitate lists of languages or species or atmosphere types or that try to teach Star Wars fans what they already know. People come back after years away and want to know what’s going on in our world, and the current SA does not have anything for them. I want a Department of Brotherhood Lore that covers the factions in our galaxy, how Jedi and Sith and Mandalorians fit into our galaxy. I want to provide the content you can’t find anywhere else and I want it to be content that you can use in your next fiction, RP session, or whatever else you’re doing.

Likewise, I want to replace courses that just talk about stuff in Star Wars with courses that walk members through how that stuff works for their characters in our possessions system. If I want to know the airspeed velocity of an unladen X-Wing, that’s what Wookieepedia is for. The SA is for teaching me out to outfit my smuggler character with a ride befitting their stature.

I want to expand our course offerings to recognize two very different types of storytelling: we have traditional fiction, but we also have an increasing number of collaborative storytelling venues in RP, run-ons, co-op fiction, and the ACC. Crafting a narrative from start to finish is hard. Surrendering control and working with a dozen co-authors to tell a story in real time is also hard. We should support people in both.

I also want to make sure that fiction isn’t the only activity stream we support. We have talented artists in this community and we want more. If we’re bold enough to teach complex skills like leadership and writing, we can take a stab at art as well.

And I definitely do not want to see courses that are just exams with links to outside documentation. We’re not here to just give you tests to take.

Positions: Now Hiring

So Zuza and I will be developing a lot of new content throughout 2023, but we’re going to need some help.

I’ve already tapped Kamjin "Maverick" Lap'lamiz to help develop the new content for Leadership, Law, and Communication. Kamjin has a successful track record as a leader here and in the EH and he has actual real world management training and experience. Most importantly, his work on the Consul’s Handbook team last year is perfectly in line with what I want to do with the Department’s new content.

In addition to Kam, I will be hiring an additional two Magistrates. Their initial task will be to review the draft style guide for new SA courses and the prospectus of new courses and degrees and offer feedback before those are finalized. Following that, they will aim to produce roughly one draft course per month. This includes roughly between 1400 and 3000 words of course notes, selecting or creating images for the notes, and an exam. The key word here is draft—if it gets bogged down in editing and all, that’s on me, not the magistrate. We may also hold off on deploying courses so that we can release an entire series together. I will be hiring M:HMs for a six-month term, with the possibility—but not guarantee—of renewing that for a second term.

One of these positions will be focusing specifically on building out a new Department of Graphics. I will need someone capable of teaching basic digital art skills to newbies. The SA supports video tutorials in addition to/instead of text, images, and gifs, we just haven’t used that yet. Course material will need to either be software-independent or use a freely available tool like Krita or GIMP; we will not expect members to purchase a PhotoShop subscription nor will we help them pirate a copy. Herald staff experience is obviously helpful here, particularly as potential courses include teaching members to develop their own warbanners and lightsabers for use on their dossiers.

I am not earmarking the other position just yet. Depending on who applies, it may be a second graphics or leadership person to get those out of the gate faster, or it may be someone focused on revising our many lore and combat courses to focus more on our systems and setting. Alternatively, it could be someone with video production experience who helps us add A/V content across departments. It could even be someone with a great idea I haven’t thought of.

To apply, PM me (Archenksov#2230). Rather than writing a long application up front, I’m going to just interview folks. If you have any experience with creating teaching/training content, have it handy because I’ll want to see it. Please make sure your ideas mesh with the principles and initiatives I outlined above–you may think Traditional Mandalorian Basket Weaving would make a cool course, but it’s not what I’m looking for and not a good use of your time to pitch me on it. I will not be hiring anyone until March 10th at the earliest, so make sure you contact me to express interest before then.

Lastly, we will be saying goodbye to Kanal, who will be moving out from the HM umbrella as the Brotherhood’s first Quizmaster, a tribune-level position responsible for trivia.

Calling All Artists and Patrons

In addition to applying for staff, there’s another way artists and art enthusiasts can help out. I think most people would agree that course notes are better when illustrated. In some cases, we make those graphics in-house. For example, the course on how XP works uses screenshots of the XP-related menus on the site. Pretty straightforward.

But when it comes to courses about lore, combat, etc. we’ve historically used images found on the internet. I think it would be better, if possible, to use images directly related to the Brotherhood and its members and characters. So I’m going to build a library of those images that we can use in future courses.

If you are an artist and you have images you would like to submit, I want them. If you have commissioned art, and you have permission for public non-commercial use, I’d be delighted to have that as well. Send your submissions to me ([Log in to view e-mail addresses] or Archenksov#2230). I’m not picky how I get it (Google Drive, Imgur, a zip archive, etc) but I will need the following information for each image:

• The artist, ideally with a link to their main web presence if they’re not a DB member

• Who commissioned the piece, if applicable

• Who or what it depicts

I suspect most of the art we have lying around is of people’s characters, which is great, but that means I’m especially in need of images of vehicles, battles, locations, creatures, and so on.

Obviously, I cannot guarantee we will use every image. But I do hope you will join me in making our SA more reflective of the club’s talent and imagination.

Closing Remarks

As always, if anyone sees any errors in the course notes or exam questions, please submit them through the form. Scrolls of Foundation are a nutritious part of a healthy XP diet.

And, of course, I am always available at [Log in to view e-mail addresses] or Archenksov#2230.

Academy Changelog

DB FUNDAMENTALS
Essentials 104: Structure of the Club
- Corrected contact info in the course notes (Wolfe)
Comms 101: Website Navigation
- Exam question corrected (Teebu)
Comms 103: DJBWiki (An Introduction)
- Corrected the current year (Teebu)
Activities 102: Gaming
- Fixed a broken link (Teebu)

CHARACTER CREATION & DEVELOPMENT
Character Sheets 102: Possessions & Loadouts
- Clarified the wording of an exam question (Nero)
Societies: GRMG
- Removed a reference to PoBs from the exam (Teebu)

COMBAT & WARFARE
ACC Studies
- Corrected an outdated feat name in the exam (Nero)
Lightsaber Combat
- Removed a question on outdated feats from the exam (Pel)
Ranged Weaponry Studies
- Fixed broken graphics (Nora)

LEADERSHIP, LORE, AND COMMUNICATION
Debate 101: Argumentation
- Typo in an exam question corrected (Kadrol)
Cryptography 101
- Corrected Markdown errors (Teebu)

LORE
Regions of the Galaxy
- Corrected a mispelling in the course notes (Kadrol)
Sith Alchemy
- Corrected multiple typos (Pel)