Hey @dmars300! Thanks a lot for taking the time to provide thorough and valuable feedback, we really appreciate it.
Your comments will definitely help shape the Optimistic Academy and better define our mission.
I’ll reply to each of your ideas and suggestions separately to keep the discussion as organized as possible, in an attempt to invite other community members to engage with it.
This is very good to know! We had some doubts on weather it would be more impactful to use our own branding or Optimism’s. After putting in some more thought and receiving feedback from you and other community members, we decided we will shift to a more Optimism aligned branding both in the landing page and in the additional resources we implement going forward.
Thanks a lot for raising this point, which is KEY to truly understand where we are heading with the Optimistic Academy. The Optimistic Academy is an entirely separate project from Solow.
While both projects have some members in common, they have very different goals. Solow is a free academy for builders in Latam. Which means it’s 100% Spanish focused. It’s also “chain” agnostic. Solow has worked with other industry leaders such as Connext, Chainlink, CoW Swap, Lens, etc.
The Optimistic Academy, on the other hand, is exclusively Optimism focused, as you might have guessed by the name 
. The goal of the Optimistic Academy is to make it 10x easier to learn about Optimism, which takes us to your next suggestion.
We totally agree on this point. Our mid-term plan is to go beyond video lectures to add both additional original content and any valuable community resources. This includes not only the fantastic work you and the Cryptoversidad team accomplished in your last mission, but other great initiatives such as the Optimism Reservoir, the RetroPGF Podcast and the Optimism Guide. By the way, super open to hear any ideas on how to integrate what you are working on @Michael @danftz @latruite.eth 
How would you shift to an open source model? How would you implement PR? Would love to go deeper into what’s on your mind.
Moving on to the content itself, I think it was Linkedin’s cofounder who said “if you aren’t ashamed of your MVP, you waited too long to launch”. And to be honest I still feel cringe when looking at my self recordings 
We are working hard to make the content much better, having community feedback so early on is really really helpful on this matter.
We have 2 ideas for making more visually engaging presentations:
- adding animations to the video lecture to emphasize key points.
- blending in “infographics” in within the video lectures to make the content more appealing.
We plan to try both methods. Any insight on which could perform better? Your experience creating top-notch content at Cryptoversidad could be very useful.
We will also play around with transitions, zooming in and out and of course some fancy old-style memes.
With regards to the substance and the topics following lessons should include, we hadn’t thought of it before, but your comments led us into the conclusion that it’s worth sharing with the community the content outline BEFORE recording. This will help us make the most out of the recording and editing efforts. Chapters on Public Goods and OP Tech have been recorded already, but we will start with sharing our thoughts for the Governance chapter so it becomes the first community built chapter within the Optimistic Academy.
Finally, we are happy that you believe inviting learners to the forum is a fantastic idea. We are really looking forward to see how that plays out.
Again, thanks for all your thoughts and support. we’ll be back with more news (and questions) very soon.
Santi