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.
— Allison Beatty


Related links:

* Self-paced, online DITA training with LearningDITA.com
* Structured authoring and XML (white paper), which is also included in our book, Content Transformation
* Confronting the horror of modernizing content
* The benefits of structured content for learning & development content
* Get monthly insights on structured learning content, content operations, and more with our Illuminations newsletter

LinkedIn:

* Sarah O’Keefe
* Allison Beatty

Transcript:
Introduction with ambient background music
Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.
Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.
Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.
Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.
End of introduction
Sarah O’Keefe: Hi everyone, I’m Sarah O’Keefe.
Allison Beatty: And I’m Allison Beatty.
SO: And in this episode, we’re focusing in on the LearningDITA architecture and how it might provide a pattern for other learning content initiatives, including maybe the one that you, the listener, are working on. We have a couple of major components in the learningDITA.com site architecture. We have learner records for the users. We have e-commerce, the way we actually sell the courses and monetize them. That is my personal favorite. And then we have the content itself and assorted relationships and connectors amongst all those pieces. So I’m here with Allison Beatty today, and her job is to explain all those things to us because Allison did all the actual wo...