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 more.

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:

• Check out our self-paced online DITA 1.3 training.


• Open-source DITA training project GitHub files

LinkedIn:

• 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 particu