LearningDITA.com: Bringing collaboration and e-learning together
Need to learn DITA but don’t know where to start? Trying to decide whether DITA is the right solution for your company? Looking for an opportunity to build on your basic knowledge of DITA? LearningDITA.com is the perfect resource for you!
DITA, which stands for Darwin Information Typing Architecture, is an open, XML-based standard for creating, organizing, and managing content. Scriptorium developed LearningDITA to provide free e-learning for those interested in gaining DITA experience. To take the courses on LearningDITA, all you have to do is register.
The courses on LearningDITA take a multi-layered approach to education, with step-by-step instructions, guided and independent exercises, and assessment questions accompanying each lesson. The courses also offer resources that enhance the material covered in each lesson, such as slide decks and instructional videos.
Current courses include:
- Introduction to DITA. Created for people who have no prior knowledge of DITA, this course offers a basic conceptual understanding of DITA. The lessons include information on the purposes of DITA, topic types, metadata, DITA content creation, tables, and relationships among topics.
- The concept topic type. This course introduces new or inexperienced DITA users to writing DITA concept topics. You’ll learn about some of the most common elements used in concept topics and complete hands-on exercises that give them experience authoring DITA concepts.
- The task topic type. Building on the DITA authoring fundamentals in the previous course, this course provides core information about DITA task topics, such as the typical structure of tasks and the differences between strict and general tasks. The course also includes best practices for task authoring.
- The reference and glossary topic types. This course rounds out the previous two courses on DITA authoring by introducing reference and glossary topics. Through a series of examples and exercises, you’ll learn to create reference topics and build a glossary of terms.
- Using DITA maps and bookmaps. In this course, you’ll learn to compile DITA topics into a map. The course covers the differences between map and bookmap structures and demonstrates the use of relationship tables.
The most recent course on maps and bookmaps kicks off a planned series of new courses, including DITA publishing, reuse, and more. All of the course content on LearningDITA comes from the open source LearningDITA project on GitHub, where you can view a roadmap of future courses and contribute your own ideas for content you’d like to see.
Scriptorium recently removed prerequisite restrictions from LearningDITA, so now you can start with any course that suits your needs. In a joint effort with Syncro Soft, Scriptorium is also rolling out the option to complete the course exercises using the oXygen web authoring interface.
LearningDITA is made possible by content contributors and corporate sponsors, including:
Scriptorium staff and other content contributors developed the LearningDITA course content in DITA using the Learning and Training specialization. Scriptorium created custom XSLT transforms to publish the courses on WordPress through the LearnDash LMS. A German version of LearningDITA, translated by Parson, will be available in the future.
To take courses and get the latest information on new courses, upgraded features, and other exciting news, register on the LearningDITA.com site.
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