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

Related links:

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

LinkedIn:

• 
  
• Alan Pringle
  
• Bill Swallow
  
• Christine Cuellar
  

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

Christine Cuellar: Hey, everybody, and welcome to today’s show. I’m Christine Cuellar, and with me today I have Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow. Alan and Bill, thanks for being here.

Alan Pringle: Sure. Hello, everybody.

Bill Swallow: Hey, there.

CC: Today, Alan, Bill, and I are going to be talking about structured content for learning content. Before we get too far in the weeds, let’s kick it off with a intro question.

Alan, what is structured content?

AP: Structured content is a content workflow that lets you define and enforce consistent organization of your information. Let’s give a quick example in the learning space. For example, you could say that all learning overviews contain information about the audience for that content, the duration, prerequisites, and the learning objectives for that lesson or learning module. And by the way, that structure that I just mentioned … It actually comes from a structured content standard called the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, DITA for short. That is an open-source standard that has a set of elements that are expressly for learning content, including lessons and assessments. And I think it’s also worth noting, another big part of the whole idea of structured content is that you are creating content in a format agnostic way. You are not formatting your content specifically for, let’s say, a study guide, a lesson that’s in a learning management system, or even a slide deck. Instead, what a content creator instructional designer does … They are going to develop content that follows the predefined structure, and then an automated publishing process is going to apply the correct kind of formatting depending on how you’re delivering the content. That way, as a content creator and instructional designer, you’re not having to copy and paste your learning content into a bunch of different tools. And I know for a fact a lot of instructional designers are doing that right now. Instead of doing all that copying and pasting, you write it one time, and then you say, “I want to deliver it for these different delivery targets, whether it’s for online purposes, whether it’s for in-person training or maybe a combination of both.” You set up publishing processes to apply the formatting for whatever your delivery targets are so you, as a human being, don’t have to mess with that.

CC: Which is awesome. Part of the reason that we’re talking about this today is that structured content has been a part of the techcomm world for over 30 years, for a really long time, and now we’re starting to see it make inroads in the learning and development space. We’ve been doing a lot of work for structured content in the learning space, but how is it different from the techcomm space? And Bill, I’m going to kick this over to you for that.

BS: I think I’m going to take a higher-level view on this because there is a lot of overlap between techcomm and learning content. Where they really start to diverge is in delivery. Techcomm is pretty uniform in how it delivers content to people. There’s personalization involved and so forth, but essentially everyone’s getting the same thing. The experience is going to be the same. Everyone’s going to get a manual. Everyone’s going to get online help. Everyone’s going to get a web resource, what have you. It might be tailored to their specific needs, but it’s a pretty candid delivery experience. For training, the focus is on the learning experience itself, and it’s usually tailored to a very specific need, whether it’s a very specific type of audience that needs information, or it’s very specific information that needs to be delivered in a very specific way for those people. Beyond that, we start looking at the content itself under the hood, and the information starts to, I would say, broaden with learning content because it can consume all the different types of information you have with technical content. And generally in a structured world, we think of that as conceptual information, how-to information, and reference information, for the most part. With learning content, now you have a completely new set of content in addition to that where you have learning objectives. You have assessments. You have overviews, reviews, all sorts of different content that essentially expands on the wealth of information you have from your technical resources.

CC: That’s great. Typically, the arguments for structured content, and the reason it’s really valuable for organizations, is it introduces consistency in your content, consistency for your brand across wherever you’re delivering content. It also helps you build some scalable content processes, that kind of thing. What are some of the arguments for structured content for the learning environment specifically, if there are any other new ones?

AP: Some of the reasons that you want to do structured content for learning content are really similar to other types of content. We’ve already talked about one of them. I touched on this earlier in regard to automated formatting. You are not having to do all of the work as a human being, applying formatting to ever how many delivery formats that you have. That is a huge win that you’re not having to do that. And especially in the training space, I have seen so many organizations copying content from one platform to another because the platforms don’t play well together, so you’ve got multiple versions of what should be the same exact content to maintain. That is another huge reason to consider structure. You want a single source of truth for your content regardless of where that information is being delivered because if you’re looking at the overall learning experience and the excellence and quality of that learning experience, if you were telling learners slightly different things in different places in your content, you are not providing an optimal learning experience. Therefore, having that single source of truth for a particular bit of information gives your learners a consistent piece of information regardless of what channel they consume it for. That’s a really important win for a solid, dependable learning experience.

CC: Gotcha. No, that definitely makes sense. It sounds like it would take some of the effort off of the subject-matter experts who are creating these trainings so that they can … They, I’m assuming, would rather focus on the work of helping train people. Getting some of the manual formatting and copy and pasting off of their workload sounds pretty nice. What are the complications that it might introduce or the change management issues that might need to be tackled when you’re bringing structured content into a learning environment?

AP: It’s true anytime you bring in structure. When people are used to working in an environment where you are doing manual formatting, and you’re seeing what things look like as you kind of develop the content, the idea of developing content in a format agnostic way where you’re not thinking about what does this slide look like, or how is this assessment going to work in the learning management system, it’s very easy to get focused on the delivery angle because you want it to be good, and you want it to be done in a way that makes that learning experience useful for the people who are trying to learn whatever it is they’re trying to learn. You don’t want those impediments of bad formatting or a not great way that your assessments behave in your learning management system, but you kind of get to offload all of those concerns, which are very valid. I’m not saying they’re not valid. They are, but you want an automated process. Basically, you want computers to do that work for you. You want programming to apply that formatting so you can really focus on getting that information as solid as it can be, and you let technology handle the rest. You do set up the standards for how you deliver that content, whether it’s in print, online, in person, whatever. However you’re delivering your learning and training content, you set the standards. “This is how I need this to behave. This is how I need it to look. This is how I need it to interact.” Once you set those standards, then you turn around and have someone who has this programmatic skill set, like we do at Scriptorium, to come in and develop the transformations that take your content and deliver it in the ways you need it delivered so you, as, like you were saying, the subject-matter expert, the instruction designer, or whatever content creator we’re talking about here … You are not doing that for every single delivery type that you are putting out for your learners.

BS: And it’s not to say that the experience isn’t tailored because it still can be tailored. Even if you are significantly reusing your content, you’re not just taking the same text everywhere. You can add personalization layers to that content and tailor certain parts of the content specific to what that specific audience needs rather than having to retype it all every single time you want to make a change if you were in a copy-paste scenario. And that also would make it a lot more difficult to update all that content as you modify it for specific audiences over time because you may not find everywhere where a piece of information has been used and modified if you need to update it. It does take a little bit of … Well, it takes a lot of the work off of those developing the content because they don’t have to worry about exactly what it looks like for every single target that they’re producing. It does require a little bit of, I would say, faith in the system that it will work. It really comes down to how you’re architecting this in the first place to make sure you understand who your varied audiences are, what the look and feel needs to be, what the delivery points are, and making sure that you are authoring within the scope of those things. And once you get that down, as Alan mentioned, it becomes a push-button operation to produce all of your various outputs.

AP: I think, too, from a change management point of view, one thing that I have heard from lots of content creators in the learning space is the burden they have, for example, if a program or the company changes names, changes logos, changes branding, if you have that built in to the formatting in a way where you’re having to go into, say, a bunch of Microsoft Word or PowerPoint files and manually change those out, and I am sure I am talking to people out there in the ether who know exactly what I’m talking about, it is extremely painful. And when you have automated the application of formatting, what you can do is change those processes to update them to include the latest corporate colors, the latest taglines, the latest fonts, the latest logos, whatever has changed so you, as a human being, again, do not have to go in there and touch all of those files yourselves because that is a burden you don’t need when you were trying to quote do your real work, which is help people learn, not apply formatting to a zillion Microsoft Word documents. Nobody wants to do that, at least nobody I know anyway.

CC: No. That’s a very good example of how the structure can just take that part of the workload off of you so you can get to focus on what you want to do. But I like, Bill, how you put it that you have to trust the process because it is an adjustment to go from authoring your content in a specific PowerPoint or in a specific Word doc to authoring it in a way that it can be reused. But ultimately what I’m hearing both of you say is that, even though it’s a valid concern that you might worry about your ability to personalize and your ability to control the user experience, once structured content is implemented correctly, and everyone is adjusted to the system, it sounds to me like you’re saying that your opportunities for personalizing at scale are actually going to be bigger than when everyone’s doing it individually, and at least it introduces consistency across those personalized experiences. Do you think that’s fair to say, either of you? Do you think that’s a fair statement, or is that too optimistic-

AP: That is an incredibly loaded question the only answer to which is … No, you were correct. That is, structure does enable all the things that you just ask in that very leading, but good, question.

CC: It is very leading.

BS: It removes the visual context of where the content is going, but it doesn’t remove … In fact, it enhances the context of what the content is about.

AP: Right.

CC: That’s a good way to say it. I like that. Looking at structured content within the learning space itself, how does it … I know, Bill, you had mentioned that, within the techcomm space, it’s fairly uniform in how content is delivered and who it’s delivered to. Not that it’s always the same. How about in the learning space? How does that vary? And how does the structure approach vary?

BS: Well, this might contradict what I said before, but it’s a slightly different look on it in that, really, the learning clients that we’ve had … They kind of mirror a lot of the techcomm clients we had in that everyone is producing roughly … If you look at it from a high enough altitude, it all looks the same. They’re all producing manuals. They’re all producing e-learning. They’re all producing whatever. When you get down into the nuts and bolts, that’s when you start finding that every single implementation is going to look a little bit different. In techcomm, you might have completely different types of content that you need to be able to handle. The same thing is with the learning space. Every single group is going to have different needs, and they’re going to have very specialized needs based on the content that they’re producing and who they’re producing it for. The learning space, unlike techcomm where they’ve basically been going down the structured path for 20, 30 years … The learning space has really been a sea of black boxes where every single system has its own way of doing things. It does about 90%, 95% of the same stuff that every other system out there does, but there is something special, something canned, something within the system that allows it to do the one thing that no other system does. And all of these technologies historically have really been locked down tight where your content goes in, and it lives and thrives in that box that you’re developing it in. But if you need to take that content out and change systems and put it somewhere else, there’s a lot of rework that potentially needs to be done depending on how customized that system you were using was. And let’s face it. You can structure content. You can centralize it. You can componentize it all you want. It’s not going to change the fact that learning content is going to have these many varied endpoints for how it’s being delivered. Even though you are consolidating and structuring in a central repository to maximize your reuse, to not worry about the formatting, you may still have three or four different learning management systems that you are pushing that content into. Each one of those systems has different requirements. The type of content that gets consumed. What it does. How it reacts. What it expects. The order it needs that information in per lesson, per page. E-page. It gets a little more complicated in the delivery of the learning content because we need to be able to tailor to not only the needs of the particular client in the content that they’re producing but the needs of the systems that need to ingest it.

AP: One other thing I would mention here is the level of interactivity, I think, is higher with learning and training content than the techcomm world. Now, I realize there are documentation portals and things like that that do provide some levels of interactivity. However, I think you are going to see much more of that kind of thing on the learning and training side, especially in regard to assessments when you are trying to have people do little, basically, mini exercises to prove that they have learned what they need to learn and that they are graded, and then those scores are recorded. That is the kind of thing you don’t see in techcomm. That is a whole, very specific thing to the learning and training world. Therefore, the structure that you choose needs to accommodate that, and your delivery targets in particular need to accommodate that very high level of interactivity with, for example, like Bill was saying, a learning management system.

BS: You have quite a variety of needs out there from basic, true/false, multiple choice, or matching all the way down to simulations, doing interactive exercises, and so forth all within a learning management system. And you need to be able to account for that. And as I mentioned, not all of those systems function in the exact same way, so it needs to be tailored.

CC: For any listeners that are listening to this episode right now, and they are in the learning content space, and they’re interested in getting started with structured content, Alan, where would you recommend they start?

AP: Well, our website, scriptorium.com, has lots–very self-serving. Very self-serving. We have a lot of resources, and we will put them in the show notes so you can get to them. We also are the creator and maintainer of a site called learningdita.com that teaches people about one way to do structured content, which is DITA, which I mentioned earlier in the show. And there is a free Introduction to DITA course that you can take. Between some links that we’ll include in the show notes in regard to what is structured content, how it applies to the learning and training space, and learning DITA, those are all good starting points for people who are considering going on the structured content journey for their learning content.

CC: That’s great. And the only thing I’ll add to that is that, if you’re interested in learning more about learning content and structured content, this is something that we talk about a lot. I would recommend also subscribing to our Illuminations newsletter which, like Alan said, that’s also going to be linked in the show notes. But every month, we send out a recap of the topics we talked about, and learning content is very often in there because we talk about it a lot.

This final question is for both of you. Is there anything else that you want to leave our listeners with about structured content in the learning content space before we wrap up today?

BS: I’d say, if you’re looking at structured content, it’s not going to on its face be a savior solution. But if with enough thought, it can really make a difference in your content development workflow, and it can save you a lot of time in producing content that is targeted to very specific people and delivery points.

AP: For me, my final suggestion here is think about your pain points. What are the things that are keeping you up at night as you develop your learning and training content? What are the continual issues you are battling, especially your content creators? What are they battling? Is it they’re having to format for umpteen different platforms? Is it that they’re needing to personalize things for different locations? For different levels of service that you were training people about? What are the things that are causing you problems? Basically, compile a list of those. And then from there, figure out, could structured content, solve any of these problems? Don’t put the cart before the horse, is the best way to put it, really. Think about your pain points in your processes and then see if structure might be the thing to solve them.

CC: That’s great. And on that, Alan, Bill, thank you very much for being here and recording this with me today.

BS: Thank you.

AP: Absolutely. We like to talk about this stuff probably too much.

CC: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.

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