Four real-world use cases for content reuse
Trying to eliminate costly content errors, increase brand consistency, and create content at scale? Consider content reuse.
LearningDITA: DITA-based structured learning content in action
Are you considering a structured approach to authoring and distributing 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
Fighting Words: a punchy conversion case study
Reeling from a one-two punch of scattered and inaccessible content? Ready to transform chaotic content into a seamless user experience? I trained a scattered group of content using a combo of robust metadata and content filtering to publish player-specific rules guides. Get in the ring and find out how you can apply these lessons to your own content processes.
The benefits of structured content for learning & development content
In this episode, Alan Pringle, Bill Swallow, and Christine Cuellar explore how structured learning content supports the learning experience. They also discuss the similarities and differences between structured content for learning content and technical (techcomm) content.
Even if you are significantly reusing your learning content, you’re not just putting the same text everywhere. You can add personalization layers to the content and tailor certain parts of the content that are specific to your audience’s needs. If you were in a copy-and-paste scenario, you’d have to manually update it every single time you want to make a change. That scenario also makes it a lot more difficult to update content as you modify it for specific audiences over time, because you may not find everywhere a piece of information has been used and modified when you need to update it.
— Bill Swallow
Flexible DITA team training with LearningDITA group licensing
With a LearningDITA group license, your company has centralized course management for your DITA team training. You can buy course licenses in bulk, assign specific courses to individual team members, and keep track of course completion. As your team grows, you can increase your quantity of course licenses or add new courses. Our group licensing page tells you how!
Discovering the Basics of DITA with LearningDITA (webinar)
In this webinar, Sarah O’Keefe shares the basics of DITA—what it is, why it’s crucial for creating structured content, and how it revolutionizes consistency and efficiency in documentation. By exploring core elements such as topics, maps, and metadata, along with DITA specializations like task, concept, and reference topics, you’ll learn why organizations around the globe use DITA to craft modular, reusable content and put it to work.
You’ll be introduced to a self-paced, online DITA training resource called LearningDITA. Lessons include exercises, links to additional resources and videos, and quizzes to test your knowledge.
What DITA offers is a mechanism for extensibility that doesn’t break the standard. If you’re going to try to build out a system that is futureproof, as best we can without knowing the future, then we need flexibility. We need the ability to change things as we go, to extend, to add new output types, to add new semantics, to add new metadata, to add new systems into the equation.
— Sarah O’Keefe
Transforming The Future: ContentOps In The Age Of AI (webinar)
In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler himself, talks about the future of content operations in the age of artificial intelligence. You may know Scott from his work as a consultant, conference presenter, and talk show host, but in this session, we turn the spotlight back on Scott and ask him what HE thinks about the future of content ops.
Viewers will learn how AI is reshaping content operations, including:
- Creating seamless system connectivity
- Transforming content creation, management, and delivery
- Changing how platforms for professional content creators work
LearningDITA: What’s new and how it enhances your learning experience
In this episode, Alan Pringle, Gretyl Kinsey, and Allison Beatty discuss LearningDITA, a hub for training on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). They dive into the story behind LearningDITA, explore our course topics, and share an exclusive coupon code for our podcast listeners.
Gretyl Kinsey: Over time that user base grew and grew. And now it boggles my mind that it got all the way up to 16,000 users. I never expected it to grow to that size.
Alan Pringle: Well, we didn’t really either, nor did our infrastructure. Because as of late 2024, things started to go a little sideways, and it became clear our tech stack was not going to be able to sustain more students. It was very creaky. The site wasn’t performing well. So we made a decision that we needed to take the site offline, and we did, to basically redo it on a new platform.
The wait is over: LearningDITA is back!
Your wait is over! LearningDITA is open again, and it’s running on a new platform to give you a better learning experience.
Calculate your DITA ROI
Will DITA bring enough value to your content operations to justify the investment costs? Calculate your DITA ROI to decide.
