This article concerns a new project among French speaking countries in the EMEA region. Its goal is to set up transitional education for doctoral applicants in the domain of educational technology, to help them write a robust PhD proposal and to enable them to apply as doctoral student in one of the partner universities. We shall discuss the first stage of an Educational Design Research (EDR) project to design a new distance teaching programme and to create a study book on research methodologies in educational technology. This EDR project is also meant to serve as a work-in-progress best practice project within the training programme to involve doctoral applicants and make research concrete. Theories and design rules from research methodologies in educational technology, textbook research, teaching research methods in the social sciences, transitional education, internationalisation, the relationship between practice and research and, finally, scientific translation will be taken into account to define the framework.