A Journey for Your Content: DITA for Learning Environments

 Martina Schmidt and Barbara Kalous, of NINEFEB, stated that technical documentation is a high-quality, versatile information product that is more than a payment trigger and a must for policy compliance. It's support for service personnel and an information basis for training materials. 

Training materials are often inefficient. They last too long and little is retained. 

The vision is to break information silos of technical documentation and training. But the silos are very solid. So what does it take?

Fist, a shared data pool. Knowledge objects in a standardized XML scheme, such as DITA. The ability to manage media. Learning target formats are necessary. 

Theory without practice is sterile. Practice without theory is blind. 

DITA is good for creating structured technical documentation. Uses a topic approach for optimum reuse. Allows for a wide range of publications.  A topic contains all elements required to define a complete unit of information that addresses a single subject or answers a single question. Good for tech docs, but good for training? 

DITA 1.3 learning and training adds additional maps, interactions, and topic types specific for learning presentations.