February General Meeting Recap:
Single-Sourcing and E-Learning

by Marisa Latin, Quill Contributor

If you were asked to create e-learning material to complement your existing documentation, wouldn't it be great if someone showed you not only how to do it, but how to do it using the resources you already have? During February's meeting, Louis Beauregard did just that. He provided us with a road map on how to use familiar tech writing tools, such as MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint, Adobe FrameMaker, Quadralay WebWorks Publisher, and Viewlet Builder to create e-learning content.

Louis Beauregard holds a Masters degree in Education, is the founder of the Montreal-area chapter of the Usability Professional's Association, and publishes a monthly newsletter called 'Hands-on Single-Sourcing with FrameMaker'. His company, Convivio, recently released BuildFire 2004, a production assistant for FrameMaker.

Your Requirements

When you start looking at an e-learning project, you need to:

• find out what the goals are,
• look at how much it's worth to you in terms of resources and what's involved, and
• consider whether your company can afford it in the long run, because the longevity of an e-learning project can be infinite.

The Process

1. Review existing content (semantic analysis).
• Perform an inventory on a spreadsheet (MS Excel) of what you already have to work with (titles, concepts, content in your user guides, online docs, etc.), because all documents are training material (self-instruction).
• Separate the information types (concepts, procedures, examples, etc.).
2. Identify elements used in the user guide and online help.
• Map onto your spreadsheet where the content elements are used in the existing deliverables (documents).
3. Model content required for e-learning.
• Use MS Word's outline feature to build a tree outline of your content elements.
• Follow instructional design 'best practices': apply consistent structure, define concepts with examples, chunk information, etc.
4. Create an e-learning prototype.
• Implement your content model visually in MS PowerPoint (for example) to see what the layout will look like.
5. Revisit semantic elements spreadsheet and add e-learning elements.
• Identify what content can be reused and what needs to be created. Add this to your spreadsheet.
6. Update your Adobe FrameMaker template to reflect all semantic elements.
• Create new paragraph and character tags, etc.
7. Create a conversion scheme using true single-sourcing tools such as Quadralay WebWorks Publisher or Mif2Go to convert FrameMaker to HTML.
• Map your paragraph and character tags to HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).
• There are few tools to choose from.
8. Author text-based content in FrameMaker.
• Create content that is shared by all deliverables first.
• Identify content that would most benefit from multimedia treatment (importance to task, frequency, error rate, etc.).
9. Create animations in Viewlet Builder. Add links to Flash animations in FrameMaker.
• Consider adding review questions.
• Plan the navigation.
10. Create and automate output for true single-sourcing.

And there you have it. In 10 manageable steps, you, too, can be on your way to creating effective e-learning material using the least amount of time and resources. You can access Louis's presentation at www.convivo.com.

About Marisa Latin

Marisa has been a technical writer for over ten years and is currently at Inscriber. She lives with her lively family and long list of pets. In her spare time, you can find her seeking nature's wonders and capturing 'life' on camera.