Overview

The DITA learning and training specialization builds on past work on topic-based content, reusable learning objects, and the learning content types needed to support them.

Problem

Today's learners confront a complex world with many inter-related bits and pieces of information, many different ways to access that information, and a strong need to identify the connection points, the objectives, and the context for what to know and what to learn.

In this environment, developers of learning and training content face many challenges, including:

How to find the context for developing and delivering the right content to the right person at the right time
How to identify the learning goals and objectives
Who and how many are the audiences
How to pull together and integrate content from many different sources and content providers
How to enable customers and partners to add, integrate, assemble, and deliver their own content

These key challenges and issues for delivery of learning and training content mirror long-standing pain points and requirements for content delivery in general. Content consumers value consistency of content and learning experiences. They desire management of content to make it shareable across and within teams. They seek to simplify the information needed to support the complex environments. Finally, they want a content development process that can enable the assembly and delivery of custom content that addresses specific learning contexts and use cases.

Objectives of the DITA learning and training content specialization

The DITA Learning specialization has the following objectives:

Provide a general top-level design for structured, intent-based authoring of learning content with good learning architecture, following DITA principles and best practices.
Some specifics of good DITA design for learning content include:
1. offers a starter set of specialized topic types that support structured, intent-based authoring of content for learning and training, including assessments
2. provides a map domain for structuring the specialized learning topics as reusable learning objects, and for managing the linking and relationships among them
3. offers basic map-driven processing to support topic linking, relationships, and simple sequencing
4. includes a starter set of commonly-used learning interactions, for use in testing and assessment
5. provides support for learning metadata based on the IEEE standard for learning objects metadata (LOM), for use in both topics and maps
Establish guidelines that promote best practices for applying standard DITA approaches to learning content, which include:
1. separation of presentation and content (as much as possible)
2. separation of content and context
3. single sourcing, repurposing, and reuse
Provide basic support for processing DITA content for general delivery as learning and training, including print and presentation delivery to support instructor-led training (ILT) and web delivery for distance learning.
Provide a framework for developing targeted support for processing DITA learning content for delivery with standards-based learning, specifically targeting SCORM. Extend DITA processing to support basic SCORM packaging and required SCORM LMS runtime behaviors. Build on best practices for behaviors to drive and present the interactions.
Build on existing DITA infrastructures as much as possible, so learning content developers do not have to start from scratch.

Note: Simply using the content models described in this specification, of course, does not ensure quality learning content. Quality learning content only results from good instructional design and in-depth learning needs analysis.

Use cases

Some use cases for using DITA for learning and training content include the following.

Enable indexing, searching, and retrieval of learning content: By structuring content with DITA topics and maps as self-contained learning objects matched with appropriate DITA metadata, it is possible to enable fast index, search, and retrieval of learning content that meets specific learning goals and objectives.
Creating custom courses quickly: A company has a large inventory of topic-based content that is used to provide technical and troubleshooting information about a set of componentized software products. It desires to enable field engineers to quickly identify technical content that is suitable for providing on-site training. With DITA learning topics and maps, the field engineers are able to quickly identify the specific technical content that matches specific learning objectives, and pull together the learning content that meets specific customer problems.
Making technical content available for direct sharing and reuse in learning and training: A DITA learning specialization makes it possible to define a context for and directly assemble and use existing technical content for delivery as learning and training. The DITA approach identifies consistent structures and patterns, and leverages them to enable a consistent approach for sharing content across teams. The result is much more opportunity to share content between different providers and across areas of expertise, to learn from each other, and to deliver content and the learning experience consistently. As a result, instead of copy, paste, and make unique as the norm, we have write once and share with others as the new norm.