Dear LW DITA SC and DITA L&T members - Carlos Evia, Amber Swope, Scott Hudson and I have been meeting occasionally over the last several months to discuss LW DITA and use cases for learning, training, and education. While we haven't covered all of the use cases we identified, we've reached the point where we do have some patterns to share in terms of content types and authoring needs, and some insights to the level of support we need for content in the existing DITA Learning and Training topics, maps, and domains. We've discussed use cases for K-12 teachers and students, for higher ed professors and teaching assistants, and for corporate training roles. Content types Here's the set of content types across these use cases. Lesson plans Exercises Quizzes Slides Reports Multi-media Text + Math Websites Tests Assignments Research papers Proposals Notes PDF EPUB (2nd to PDF) Grading rubric Feedback memos and reports Theses and dissertations Authoring tools Here's the set of authoring tools / technologies currently in use to create and deliver this content: Google docs MS Word, MS PowerPoint MS Excel Learning Management System (LMS) - "native" authoring directly in the LMS. Specifics vary by LMS. Text editor, such as Notepad, etc. Camtasia LaTeX - commonly used in higher ed for theses and publication articles Wikis For higher-ed specifically - Potentially big interest in LaTex and Markdown Word and Powerpoint and Excel LMS - Sakai, Blackboard, D2L DITA 1.2 L&T components - which do we need to support? Finally, here's my take on the set of existing DITA 1.2/1.3 L&T components and priorities for support them in LW DITA. Topic types learningAssessment - getting the most use, to deliver test questions learningOverview - in some use, but as a container for generic sections learningContent - in some use, but as a container for generic sections learningSummary - in some use, but as a container for generic sections learningPlan - no reported use Maps DITA 1.2 has the l&t map domain, and DITA 1. introduces object and group map types. SAP has the most developed use case for these maps, for delivering training content. My take is that for LW DITA, we do not need specific L&T map support, though that's up for more discussion and input. Question-Answer Interactions domain The interactions domain has gotten the most use and interest. We need to determine an approach for addressing this in LW DITA. Here's the set of 1.2/1/3 interaction types: lcOpenQuestion - high use lcTrueFalse - high use lcSingleSelect - high use lcMultiSelect - high use lcMatching - less use lcHotspot - less use lcSequencing - less use Common topic elements Here's the elements used in common across the Overview, Content, and Summary topics. The most important need is support for lcObjectives. Of the other elements, all except lcDuration are generic specializations of section (in other words, they're section with a new element name - so perfect fit for an LW DITA section). lcObjectives - The only element available across all five of the L&T topic types; most important for LW DITA lcIntro - section specialization lcAudience - simple section specialization lcDuration - needed, but probably not as defined in the L&T specialization, which is based on data and difficult to use. lcPrereqs - simple section specialization lcResources - simple section specialization lcChallenge - simple section specialization lcInstruction - simple section specialization lcReview - simple section specialization lcNextSteps - simple section specialization lcSummary - simple section specialization Learning Metadata Domain DITA 1.2 also includes a learning data domain, which provides a subset of the learning object metadata elements. I am not aware of any use of these elements, but if we need any of them, we can include them as an optional domain. LRMI and Schema.org... On learning metadata more generally and K-12 specifically, we may want to track the activities around the Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) and the Google schema.org initiative. LRMI has sponsorship from the US Dept of Ed, and uses extensions to schema.org as way to inject learning metadata into web pages. We could certainly use DITA subjectscheme classifications to inject schema.org markup into an HTML page. See
https://developers.google.com/structured-data/schema-org and
http://www.lrmi.net/ . Your thoughts and comments are welcome! For interested members of the L&T SC - please consider joining the LW DITA SC and discussions. Thanks. John ___________________________________ John Hunt Senior Technical Content Architect IBM Enterprise Social Solutions User Experience: Design and Information Excellence