Program by Day
Program by Track
Program Titles
“Wiki Roundtripping? Structured Authoring? How Do They Co-Exist?”
24 Ways to Shut Down The Application and Other Apocryphal Stories
A Comparison of Three Visual Help Authoring Tools
Beyond L10N and G11N—Communicating with Everybody
Breathing Life into your Technical Documents using Adobe AIR and the Technical Communication Suite
Bringing the Video Revolution to Technical Communication
Changing the Rules of the Game for the Benefit of the User
Document Engineering in User Experience Design
Documentation Planning and Library Design in a Web 2.0 World
Extending the Value of Content in Enterprise Systems with Web Content Management
How an Author and Editor Used a Wiki to Write a Book
Living Multiple Lives: The New Technical Communicator
Making XML Technology Accessible
Manage Your Messaging with Machine-Assisted Editing and Large Scale Sentence-level Reuse
Mapping the Entire Global Content Supply Chain
On the Road to Modular Training Content
Once Content is in XML. Now what?
Putting Everything Back Together Again
See Dynamic Publishing in Action!
Taking Our Information Assets to the Next Level
The In.vision DITA Enterprise Suite for Microsoft Word and SharePoint
Understanding and Communicating the Financial Impact of XML and DITA
Understanding Component Content Management
Using Collaborative Tools for Virtual Team Management
Using Task Modeler to Streamline DITA Content Development
What Technical Communicators Need to Know about Flash
Wikis Are Wonderful, or Are They? A Real World Story of Using Wikis For User Information
Writing Reusable Content to Support Content Models
[Workshop] Moving from Unstructured Documents to Structured XML
[Workshop] An Overview of RoboHelp 7
[Workshop] Content Engineering
[Workshop] DITA Authoring and Publishing with XMetaL
[Workshop] Introduction to XSL
[Workshop] Making DITA Work For Your Data
[Workshop] Simplified Technical English
[Workshop] Single Sourcing with the Technical Communication Suite
Session Details
On the Road to Modular Training Content: A Case Study
Speaker: Linda UrbanTime: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Date: May 8
Track: Training
Experience level: All levels
Room: Dundarave Room
Ah, the wonders of reuse and repurposing of information! How enticing it seems. How orderly and straightforward the vision can sound--a clearly defined content structure, writers trained to write in a modular fashion, and a content management solution in place.
In fact, implementing reuse across information deliverables—--both training and documentation--is a rather messy process. It tends to have starts and stops. And it almost never exists in a vacuum; new deliverables continue to be needed along the way.
This case study provides a glimpse into the early stages of a reuse project in a training department. The immediate need is to modularize the curriculum and materials for a key, instructor-led training course. This modularization is needed fairly quickly, to address customer requests for more personalized versions of the class. But looking down the road, there are potential areas for reuse across other trainings, and eventually with the product documentation. With an eye to the future, it is essential to consider what “modular” means at a number of different levels.
Every reuse project poses challenges--—that’’s where they get messy. This case study will show you some of the challenges faced on this project, and how we addressed them.
For example:
- Existing training materials are in different formats--some in FrameMaker and PowerPoint, others in XML and a content management system
- We will need to publish multiple course variations before all content is moved to one platform
- Design decisions need to be resolved across multiple training departments
- Limited resources (a very small team)
In this session, Linda Urban will focus on the strategies used, trade-offs made, and lessons learned to date as the team moves toward making training content modular with both short and long-term goals in mind.
