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.

Related links:

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• As a thank-you to our podcast listeners, you can get 25% off our nine-course bundle! Click here for our nine-course bundle and use the coupon code LDPODCAST during checkout. 
  
• Open-source DITA training project GitHub files
  

LinkedIn:

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• Alan Pringle
  
• Gretyl Kinsey
  
• 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

Alan Pringle: Hey, everyone, I am Alan Pringle, and today I am here with Gretyl Kinsey and Allison Beatty. Say hello, you two.

Gretyl Kinsey: Hello.

Allison Beatty: Hello.

AP: We are together here today because we want to talk about LearningDITA, our e-learning site for the DITA specification because we have just moved it to a new platform. So we want to give you a little background on what went on with that decision. So first of all, Gretyl, you and I were at Scriptorium when we kicked off this site, and I just went back and looked at blog posts. We announced it via blog post I wrote in July of 2015. So we have had this site up and running for 10 years, which absolutely blows my mind.

GK: It blows my mind too. It’s hard to believe that it’s been that long because it does seem like it got launched pretty recently in my memory, but it has been through a lot of changes and so has the entire landscape of content creation as well. So yeah, it’s really cool that now we can look back and say it has been 10 years of LearningDITA being on the web.

AP: For those who may not be familiar with the site, give us a little summary of what it is.

GK: Sure. So LearningDITA is a training resource on DITA XML and it’s developed by Scriptorium, and it covers a lot of the main fundamentals of DITA. So we have some courses on basic authoring and publishing. We also have a couple of courses on reuse and one course on the DITA learning and training specialization. So you get a good overview of a lot of different areas of DITA XML. And all of the courses are self-guided e-learning. So you can go through and take them at your own pace. You can go back and take the courses again if you want a memory refresher. And they all come with a lot of examples and exercises. So you get a download of sample files that you can work your way through. There’s some of that practice that’s guided, and then there’s others that you do on your own. And then there are also assessments throughout each course that help you test your knowledge. So you get a really nice hands-on approach to LearningDITA. So that’s why we called the site that in the first place. And it really helps to get those basics, those fundamentals in place if you are coming at it as a beginner who is unfamiliar with DITA or maybe you have some familiarity, but you want to just reinforce what you know.

AP: So we went along with this site and kept adding courses over the years. I think we got to nine, is that right? I think it’s nine.

GK: That’s right. So we really started this out, like I was mentioning earlier, that we needed something that was beginner-friendly, something for people who were unfamiliar with DITA because we saw a gap in the information that was available at the time 10 years ago. A lot of the DITA resources, documentation, guides and things like that out there were something that assumed some prior knowledge or prior expertise, and there wasn’t really anything that filled that gap. So we came up with these courses. And the nine courses that we have, the first one is just an introduction to DITA. So that was the first one that launched back in July of 2015. And then shortly after that, we added a few courses on topic authoring. So that covers the main topic types, concept, task reference and glossary entry. And then we just added more courses over time. So we’ve got one that covers the use of maps and book maps. We’ve got one that covers publishing basics. We have, like I mentioned, the two courses on reuse. So there’s a more introductory basic reuse course and then a more advanced reuse course, and then learning and training. So those are the nine courses that we have, and they’ve been up there pretty much the entire time. The earliest ones where that introduction, the authoring, and then we added the others as the demand increased over time.

AP: And that demand, I’m glad you mentioned that, really did increase because as of late 2024, we had over 16,000 students in the database for LearningDITA, which also completely blows my mind.

GK: Yeah, it does for me too, because I think in the early days we saw a lot more individuals using it, and then over time we would see more large groups of users sign up. So an entire class whose professor might’ve recommended taking the LearningDITA courses or sometimes an organization, whether it was one of our clients or just another organization, would have a lot of employees sign up all at once. And so yeah, over time that user base grew and grew. And now it does boggle my mind as well that it got all the way up to 16,000 users. I never expected it to grow to that size.

AP: Well, we didn’t really either, nor did our infrastructure. Because as of late last year, 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. And Allison, this is where I want you to come in because you are one of the, shall we say, victims on the Scriptorium side who got to dive into what our requirements were, what we needed to do. Essentially, I mean, we really became consultants for ourselves and turned our consultant eye at our problem to figure out what it was. And Allison, if you don’t mind, tell us a little bit about that process and where we landed.

AB: Yeah, so the platform was the first big choice that we knew we had to make, and things started out pretty fuzzy because we didn’t really know what we were doing and just had to figure out what was going to work to solve these pain points. And so as a starting place, we knew we needed a new LMS, learning management system. And so we did some research on what learning management systems were out there and thought about what we could use that would fit our needs. And we ended up choosing Moodle, which is an open source LMS that is very widely used within colleges and universities and higher education settings. And we knew it could be very powerful and probably suit our needs with some custom work. But the thing about Moodle is it’s known for having a high barrier to entry in terms of the installation, and that made us a little nervous. But the more we kept looking at LMS options, both open source and commercial, we realized that Moodle is so popular and industry standard almost for a reason and that it was worth taking on that challenge.

AP: And I even had someone in the learning space because I asked her advice, what LMS would you use? She pretty much said run away from Moodle because for a lot of the reasons that you just mentioned. But I think it’s worth noting, it does have… There are a lot of people using it, especially in educational settings, schools, universities. It’s also the open source angle was appealing because that way it didn’t look like we were picking “favorites” by picking a particular proprietary LMS.

AB: Yeah, definitely. And then the other piece of the puzzle there as far as how we’re going to display and host the learning content was the DITA transform for the content itself and how we were going to get the LearningDITA content into our LMS. And so we knew that Moodle is compatible with both SCORM and xAPI and we ended up deciding that we wanted to develop a DITA to SCORM transform because SCORM is something that we have discussed and worked on with other clients as we’ve been seeing this trend in learning and training content pickup.

I don’t know if Gretyl wants to talk a little bit about how she’s seen SCORM throughout various projects and why we decided it was something we wanted to pursue and learn more about ourselves.

AP: And what is it while you’re at it? That too.

AB: That’s a good question. I’ll just go ahead and talk a little about what it is without getting too deep technically. Basically it’s a standard for e-learning content and it provides communication that can do things like track grades within your LMS. In the LearningDITA, the previous site and the current site, you had to pass assessments to get to the next lesson. And so SCORM can handle things like tracking assessment completion and scores. It’s pretty flexible and widely used. It’s more or less just a standard, but it requires a pretty specific data structure for it to function because it’s expecting certain data structures that are defined in the standard for it to work in different environments. And Gretyl, would you like to talk a little bit about how we’ve seen the SCORM standard pop up through various client projects?

GK: Sure. So we have seen I think over especially these last 10 years since LearningDITA launched an increase or a bit of an uptick in clients who come to us with e-learning content specifically. Some of them, that’s the only content they have. For others, they are trying to get some sort of a process for developing both e-learning content and then other kinds like technical documentation, marketing content. But a lot of them end up going down this path where they realize DITA XML is going to be helpful for content creation, especially if they do have that cross-department collaboration or reuse that needs to happen. And SCORM has been something that we’ve seen crop up with a lot of these projects. Because like you mentioned, Allison, it offers all that flexibility around things like scoring the assessments, keeping that student data that’s needed. And we’ve also seen how it’s really good when you’ve got an organization that has to deliver e-learning content to multiple different LMSs. So let’s say they’ve got students in a lot of different geographical areas or different industries and they all use different LMSs. That SCORM package can be delivered into all of them and used. And so they get that flexibility. So we’ve seen this crop up in a lot of different client projects. And the more we saw it pop up in these different projects, the more we said this might be beneficial for us too. And we’ve seen all the different ways that these organizations have made use of SCORM packages and why not give it a try for our LearningDITA content. And which by the way, I just wanted to mention, I don’t think we explicitly said this, but all of the LearningDITA courses themselves are authored in DITA XML. So kind of meta layer there to think about. But because of that, we have to think about how are we going to publish this information, get these e-learning courses out onto the web. And so a DITA to SCORM transform, as Allison said, is the approach that we decided on.

AP: And those source files, by the way, are part of this open source project that’s out in GitHub. And we’ll put some links in the show notes about it. But you can look at the source files that we used and download them for free. They’re open source. You can look at them and even use them for your own purposes if you like.

GK: And one question I had there, so you mentioned that all of those files are free and LearningDITA itself, the website, the platform has always been free, but now we are introducing a new pricing model. And so Alan, I wanted to ask you about that, how that change came about, why we made that decision to go from an entirely free resource to something with a new pricing model?

AP: Yeah, that’s a hard one and it was not a fun discussion. It wasn’t. But basically considering we’ve got 10 years of work invested in this, we had both hundreds of hours invested in developing and maintaining the site and all the courses. We also have hosting costs involved. So it got to the point to where especially with those 16,000 students, things were just not sustainable. And the tech model, the tech stack was not working anymore. So we knew we had to do something and invest more time into the platform or frankly abandon it. And when you look at the choices, completely shut down the site and get rid of that resource or decide to charge very small amounts in most courses are going to be $15, that’s going to be the entry price point. The intro course will always be free. That was the decision that we made. And there will be coupon codes. There will be discounts for bundles and other things. So we realize we are changing from the free model. Wish we didn’t have to do it. But looking at the reality of the time that we’ve invested in it and to keep it running in the future, that was a decision that we made to keep this running for the long haul.

GK: And I think, like we’ve said, we’ve seen so many changes in the content space, the industry itself over these years. And I think evolving and making sure that we are keeping track of the value that we add by having this resource makes sense to go to that pricing model.

AP: And I want to talk a little more about the Moodle part of this equation, because the way that it works is different than what we had before. And I think it’s worth noting the user experience is a little different. Because when you open up a course, it essentially opens up in a SCORM package viewer. Allison, could you talk just a little bit about how that experience is different?

AB: Yeah. So something that we noticed about Moodle is that it’s a very low-code, no-code type of platform. And so part of that SCORM decision was we wanted to be able to single source the content that lives in that repo or repository. We didn’t want to manually insert all that content. And so the way that SCORM ends up interacting with the Moodle site is that instead of having the content baked into webpages, it launches equivalent to an iframe, but it launches a second window where you take the course. And then when you close out that window, it ends your session. So don’t freak out if a second window pops up when you go to take your course. That’s the way that it is designed to work with the SCORM transform.

AP: And then Moodle records your activity, how well you’ve done with the quizzes, and all of that kind of information.

AB: And on the technical back end, all of that grade recording and assessment tracking is something that is handled because of the SCORM transform and how we built the Moodle site.

AP: And I think it is time for us to mention the people who really helped build that Moodle transform. Let’s call them out by name. Thank you to Jake Campbell, Simon Bate, and Melissa Kershes. Thanks to all of them for getting in there and helping us get that done.

GK: And I can just say after doing a lot of end user testing to make sure this works, I actually think it is easier to keep track of where you are than it was in our previous platform. I like that it pops things out into a new window. It really helps you, guide you along as you go through each part of the course. And it pops up with notifications about saving your progress if you need to stop and start a course at any point. And it does make it very clear where you are in the course and whether you have passed those assessments. And so the entire package does work really well. I think it’s really intuitive as an end user. And hopefully for all of you who go and take the courses on the new platform, you will see the same thing.

AP: I think it’s worth mentioning too, moving to this new platform, it’s going to give us opportunities to do more things in the future. We will be adding new content, especially as the DITA 2.0 standard comes out. So when that is released by the committee that controls the standard, we will do some updates to our courses. And I think we’re going to maybe do some micro learning perhaps, some live e-learning. We’ve got lots of choices here, so stay tuned for that.

CC: Hey listeners, this is Christine from Scriptorium, and I wanted to jump in to say that we’ve added a coupon code for our LearningDITA nine-course bundle, which is LDPODCAST. All one word, LDPODCAST, and that gets you 25% off our nine-course bundle. Any time you find this podcast, you can head over the LearningDITA and check it out. There will be instructions there on how to purchase your course bundle. So if you’re interested in getting started with LearningDITA, that’s a way to get you started, and thanks for listening to the show! 

And with that, Allison and Gretyl, I want to thank you very much for your work on the site and for talking with us today.

GK: Absolutely. Thank you.

AB: Thank you.

The post LearningDITA: What’s new and how it enhances your learning experience appeared first on Scriptorium.