Ready to see the business advantages of structured content in action? These case studies show how moving to structured content can reduce time-to-market, enable accelerated global content delivery, and deliver personalized outputs that improve user experiences.
For nine years, the Scriptorium site LearningDITA.com served more than 16,000 students seeking knowledge about the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) XML standard. A critical system failure forced Scriptorium to rebuild the site, so we focused our consulting expertise on ourselves to address a replatforming challenge for structured learning content.
Are you considering a structured approach to creating your learning content? We built LearningDITA.com as an example of what DITA and structured learning content can do! In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Allison Beatty unpack the architecture of LearningDITA to provide a pattern for other learning content initiatives.
Because we used DITA XML for the content instead of the actual authoring in Moodle, we actually saved a lot of pain for ourselves. With Moodle, the name of the game is low-code/no-code. They want you to manually build out these courses, but we wanted to automate that for obvious reasons. SCORM allowed us to do that by having a transform that would take our DITA XML, put it in SCORM, and then we just upload the SCORM package to Moodle and don’t have to do all the painful things of, you know, “Let’s put a heading two here with this little piece of content.” And the key thing is that allowed us to reuse content.
In this episode, Alan Pringle, Bill Swallow, and Christine Cuellar explore how structured learning content supports the learning experience. They also discuss the similarities and differences between structured content for learning content and technical (techcomm) content.
Even if you are significantly reusing your learning content, you’re not just putting the same text everywhere. You can add personalization layers to the content and tailor certain parts of the content that are specific to your audience’s needs. If you were in a copy-and-paste scenario, you’d have to manually update it every single time you want to make a change. That scenario also makes it a lot more difficult to update content as you modify it for specific audiences over time, because you may not find everywhere a piece of information has been used and modified when you need to update it.
In episode 168 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Leslie Farinella, Chief Strategy Officer at Xyleme, discuss the challenges facing content operations for learning content, insights for navigating information silos, and recommendations for successful enterprise-wide collaboration.
Why do we still have these silos of content? Back to what you said, Sarah, if we’re thinking about the learner experience, the learner doesn’t distinguish between classroom, e-learning, looking something up, or going to technical documentation. They just know, “I gotta get my job done. I need to perform. I need to know what I’m doing.”
In episode 164 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Chris Hill of DCL talk about where you can find redundancy in your learning content, what causes it, and how a single source reuse strategy can eliminate duplication.
You really start to run into trouble when you need to make version two, and you discover a problem with version one. If I’m making some marketing materials, maybe I need to use some information from the engineering team or from the manuals for whatever product I’m marketing. I might just copy that information over and put it into my marketing materials. Then, when we go to produce our training for that particular product, we might say, “Okay, I need that stuff. I’m gonna copy that from wherever I can find it,” which might be from marketing or engineering depending on where I look and who I know better or which repository is easier for me to get to. The problem here is that if anybody has made any edits along the way, they have to ensure that those edits are propagated through all these departments. And that doesn’t always happen.
In episode 160 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Alan Pringle and special guest Phylise Banner talk about the limitations of the learning management system, the rise of the learning content ecosystem, and more.
“I think about enterprise-wide applications. Consider the tools that are used to generate help solutions. Let’s just use Jira as an example. You have a knowledge base, enterprise-wide, and everyone at the organization has access to ask a question or search the knowledge base, or something like that. That’s where I want to go, that’s what I want to see. I want my learning experience platform to be like that. I want a knowledge base that I can tap into any place, anytime, anywhere. And then, have my mastery checked in the ways that I want to have it checked. ”
In episode 149 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Christine Cuellar discuss the unique challenges, opportunities, and considerations of content operations with elearning content.
“As an instructional designer, as a person who’s creating this learning content, you start thinking about, How do I deliver this effectively?How do I ensure that learning actually takes place? That’s our goal here. We want the people to learn the thing.”
Whether you’re in education, manufacturing, finance, healthcare, or otherwise, you work in a learning organization. It’s critical to ensure that your employees and customers understand how to do their jobs. If your products affect health and safety — medical devices, industrial equipment, and so many more — you need effective learning content to prevent injuries or even death. Providing training through a variety of learning options leads to success.
If you are doing a lot of workarounds and manual labor to address your content requirements, you’ve probably outgrown your content tool and need to move on to greener (and more efficient) pastures.
Learning content is any material used for educational purposes, including e-learning courses, training guides, instructor guides, instructional videos, and more. This might represent the bulk of the content you produce, or it might be just one part of your overall content set. Either way, it’s important to develop a plan for creating, updating, and delivering learning content as efficiently as possible. Here are some tips for addressing learning content as part of your content strategy.
00:03 Gretyl Kinsey: Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In episode 14, we discuss the DITA Learning and Training specialization.
More than 900 people have signed up for our free DITA courses on LearningDITA.com—thank you! You’ve had a basic introduction to DITA and learned how to write concept, task, reference, and glossary topics. Now you can learn how to collect those topics and establish relationships among them with our newest course: Using maps and bookmaps.
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