DITA 2 SCORM Plugin ?

[guillaume SEJOURNE]

Hi,

I'm trying to know if some sort of DITA-OT plugin exists to convert DITA learning specialization topics into SCORM.

Crawling the web, I did find a few things about this, bit this dates back to at least v 1.8 of DITA-OT.

I haven't made up my mind yet on using SCORM at all, and am considering all options I have to build training materials, so if the project is sort of dead, please let me know :)

Thanks,

-Guillaume

[Ron Wheeler]

Perhaps you can explain a bit about what kind of training you have to create.

You also need to consider how much interactivity you need in the courses.

SCORM allows a course to have a lot of interactivity but DITA does not.

I have never heard of any course authoring tool that can incorporate DITA fragments into courses.
That would be the ideal situation so that display of approved corporate text fragments could be incorporated by reference into interactive courses.
For example:
Display the organizations current privacy policy held in DITA during a course that asks the learner to respond to situations or questions.

The course would still have to be regenerated each time the policy changed and some of the questions and responses might need examination unless they are also maintained in DITA.

Certainly not a silver bullet for course development.

Ron

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[Eliot Kimber]

Ron: You are misinformed. The Learning and Training Interactions markup (learning and learning2 domains) provide markup for creating interactive assessments. Through specialization you can add additional interaction models not provided by the base interaction types.

I put together a simple DITA-to-SCORM plugin back when DITA 1.2 was released but at the time we didn't have a good place to host it and the code has languished since then. I have recently produced a set of plugins that provides *static* rendering of Learning and Training assessments for both HTML and PDF outputs (https://github.com/dita-community/org.dita.learning2.html and https://github.com/dita-community/org.dita.learning2.pdf)

The L&T interactions markup (the learning and learning2 domains) provide all the markup needed to author questions and answers from which interactive assessments can be generated.

I could probably reconstitute the SCORM stuff and put in the DITA Community GitHub organization but I probably wouldn't have bandwidth to support it at this time, not without a little bit of funding at least.

Part of the challenge with any SCORM plugin is that every LMS system has a different API so any generic plugin would still need to be adapted to produce SCORM packages that work with specific LMS systems. In addition, the license terms of the public SCORM components don't allow them to be packaged and shipped with a plugin, so anyone using a SCORM plugin has to manually add the SCORM-specific parts, which is annoying.

Cheers,

E.

On Sat, Jan 28, 2017 at 9:36 AM, 'Ron Wheeler' via DITA-OT Users <dita-o...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Perhaps you can explain a bit about what kind of training you have to create.

You also need to consider how much interactivity you need in the courses.

SCORM allows a course to have a lot of interactivity but DITA does not.

I have never heard of any course authoring tool that can incorporate DITA fragments into courses.
That would be the ideal situation so that display of approved corporate text fragments could be incorporated by reference into interactive courses.
For example:
Display the organizations current privacy policy held in DITA during a course that asks the learner to respond to situations or questions.

The course would still have to be regenerated each time the policy changed and some of the questions and responses might need examination unless they are also maintained in DITA.

Certainly not a silver bullet for course development.

Ron

On 27/01/2017 11:02 AM, guillaume SEJOURNE wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to know if some sort of DITA-OT plugin exists to convert DITA learning specialization topics into SCORM.

Crawling the web, I did find a few things about this, bit this dates back to at least v 1.8 of DITA-OT.

I haven't made up my mind yet on using SCORM at all, and am considering all options I have to build training materials, so if the project is sort of dead, please let me know :)

Thanks,

-Guillaume

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Eliot Kimber

[Ron Wheeler]

This is good news.

I am not sure what you mean by the statement about each LMS having a different API.

The main course authoring tools produce courses that run on all LMSs that support the SCORM version in which the course is published.
There are several popular versions that support different APIs. SCORM 2004 (4 editions) and SCORM 1.2 are supported by most LMSs.
We bult our own LMS that supportd 2 versions of SCORM and we sell the Saba learning suite which supports SCORM courses.
Both support SCORM courses created by different authoring tools without any problem.

Can you provide some examples of the types of interactions and result scoring that can be provided?
The most common ones related to assessment are
- yes/no and true/false
- multiple choice - single right answer - multiple right answers(rare)
- multiple choice - multiple choices required
- matching ideas
- put in correct order
- fill in the blanks
more interactive
- drag and drop
- simulation

Can you describe what you were able to provide in terms of scoring and tracking ( count, percent grade, weighted scores, wrong answer reporting).


Another issues is the dynamic presentation of content. - merging narration, images, text on the screen so that the timing of the text and images matches the narration.
For example: show the text "DITA File editing" in blue on a white background positioned on the right side, halfway down the window, at 5 seconds show the image PersonAtKeyboard.gif to the left of the text, at 10 seconds replace the image with DITAScreenExample12.jpg, at 20 seconds, remove the images and replace the text with "Regardless of the tool used, the DITA file must be valid."  in black on a salmon background and then let the narration finish.

Not sure how you can describe this in the DITA specializations.



Can you elaborate on the licensing issue. I gather that these are SCORM wrappers that you want to use. We did use one many years ago and did not have a licensing issue but perhaps we were not being compliant.

We were wrapping a Flash-based course delivery program that we wrote that used XML to describe the content and interactions.
It was done before SCORM and we had to wrap it in a SCORM wrapper to communicate the results of our assessments to SCORM.
We built our course delivery platform in 2001-2003 which was before SCORM and before we knew about DITA.
We chose XML as the language to describe the course. This  works well.
We made the system extensible using templates to describe different types of dynamic content and assessments.
I suppose that it would be possible to use a plug-in to merge DITA and XML template descriptions and style information to produce course pages that could be delivered.

We never built an interactive editor which we felt was the next step.

We also need to replace the Flash ActionScript with JavaScript and HTML5 to get the platform off the Flash player.

Ron

[Patrick Leevers]

Hi
I've been developing PDF and WebHelp teaching materials for STEM subjects for quite a few years, and experimented now and then with the first DITA-to-SCORM plugin. It was a useful basic demo, but since it provided feedback only through alert boxes it was necessarily limited. Otherwise it seemed to me that in principle the entire range of interactions could be specified using DITA L&T code: for example, the many subspecies of multiple choice question could be rendered distinctively through use of the @ouputclass attribute.

The original plugin is difficult to find and it no longer works, but it's not difficult to patch up.

Very recently I've been looking at the open-source Xerte package (www.xerte.org.uk) developed at Nottingham University.  Being XML-based, Xerte seems to me to offer some exciting possibilities as a rendering engine for DITA L&T code. It offers a wide range of interactive pages, and can render them as SCORM objects in HTML5. Unless I'm missing something (NB I'm a mechanical engineer, not a developer!), much work could be saved by writing and sharing XSLT code to transform DITA L&T to Xerte XML.

Cheers
Pat

[Ron Wheeler]

XERTE looks a bit like what we did.
They have got a lot further with the authoring tool.
Integrating DITA content would require a bit of rethinking of their tools.

I  have not downloaded the code or looked into the project files to see how a course is represented in XML.

Without more information about the DITA L&D specialization, it is hard to know how useful this approach is.

The fundamental question is "Where is a DITA-based approach superior to using a modern course authoring tool?"

Creating a lot of extra DITA that is not reusable makes no sense to me.
There has to be a situation where some of the material created for other purposes needs to be incorporated into a course.
This seems to imply very small topics that can fit into a scene (page) of eLearning surrounded by a small amount of glue that is not reusable.
I am not sure what the reusability of assessments is outside a course.

Changes to DITA topics will only get incorporated into a course if the course is republished which requires some sort of trigger for the L&D group if they are not responsible for the DITA topic.

Modern SCORM authoring tools are very easy to use and are designed to be easy for Subject Matter Experts and instructors to use.
DITA is not targeted at this audience.

Ron

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[Patrick Leevers]

Hi Ron

"Creating a lot of extra DITA that is not reusable makes no sense to me."

The situation for me was the opposite: The L&T domain offers added value by integrating interactive elements with existing PDF lecture notes which are also published in WebHelp (with feedback). 

For me DITA's original selling points were the usual ones: shareability, format independence etc.. With the exception of its Business School, Imperial College London never engaged much with online learning; other faculties are mostly science and engineering, and neither academics nor students are enthusiastic.  The exceptions would be recorded lectures (much used by students, mistrusted by academics), and formative quizzes, and DITA neatly integrates both of these elements. Note the "formative", though. SCORM is a useful packaging format, but we seldom used any form of online assessment for credit.

Cheers
Pat

On Friday, 27 January 2017 16:02:01 UTC, guillaume SEJOURNE wrote:

[Ron Wheeler]

Sorry to hear that eLearning is not viewed more positively.

Our clients have used it for basic science and operational training in refinery and chemical plant operation.
If the material is presented in what we call triple-e Learning - Engaging, entertaining and effective, it is well received by learners.
If you just turn slides into courses, it is just a waste of time for both the instructor and the student.

Animation is a very good tool for many STEM topics since a lot of the difficult bits are about relationships between dynamic objects.
Calculus is all about dymanic relationships. A lot of chemistry and physics is about things moving, combining, breaking up or exerting influence over each other.
These are very hard to show on a slide or whiteboard. Easy in an animation.

We view assessment as an integral part of the engagement process and design formative assessments (not graded) into the course after every section (3-5 slides). These differ from summative tests that are marked and usually appear at the end of a chapter or at the end of the course. A student can retry a formative test question and can not proceed past any question until they provide the right answer.
This provides immediate re-enforcement of the topic and prevents students from lapsing into autopilot mode where they mindlessly click from screen to screen.
This mimics the good lecture hall practice of interacting with the audience through questions, polls and asking for feedback during a lecture
It has the advantage of 100% participation, individual pacing and the ability to repeat parts of topics based on individual levels of understanding.
The fact that marking takes zero time and feedback is instantaneous helps both instructors and learners.

It also turns around the relationship between student and instructor. The instructors are no longer the adversaries setting and marking tests that measure your relationship to the material present by that same person.
They now become mentors and coaches who are available to help master the material presented and assessed by an unfeeling machine.

One on the "bad" things that often happens is that academics are left without resources (training, professional tools and time) to create courses.
This results in inconsistent look and feel, inconsistent navigation, poor design and inconsistent quality which shows up in dissatisfied consumers and producers.

Being a good chemist and a good instructional designer are not the same thing. A university would never hire a PhD in Instructional Design to teach third year Chemistry but often has no problem asking a Chemistry PhD to do instructional design.

The nice thing about STEM is that most of the material has a long lifetime so that the initial investment can be recovered over a number of years.
It is also an area where many universities could cooperate to produce and share courses. Inorganic Chemistry is pretty much the same everywhere.
 

Nothing to do with DITA but may help to explain my expectations for courses and my criteria for integrating DITA into eLearning.

SCORM is currently the only technology that is well supported.
xAPI (TinCan) is coming and is will be widely support in a few years and will replace SCORM over the next decade.

If you look at the major authoring commercial tools, you will see that they can publish a course in many delivery formats (various SCORM version, TinCan, pure HTML, static PDF, etc.) so that your investment in the content creation effort is protected regardless of how you need to deliver the content.
If your delivery platform changes, you can just republish your course in the required format without any alteration to the contents.


Ron

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[Ron Wheeler]

I agree with " the focus of DITA is on content, not delivery,".
Teaching is all about delivery. Content is usually readily available in books, articles and research papers.
A good teacher is not one who knows all the facts or where they can be found but is someone who can package up the facts into a curated and digestible package that learners are willing to spend time and money to get.

Being able to access facts held and maintained in DITA topics is more interesting to me than using DITA to describe delivery.


Ron

On 01/02/2017 1:56 PM, Eliot Kimber wrote:

My focus on L&T stuff has largely been in the context of textbooks and text prep publications, where you need generic markup for assessments, for example, to create a library of re-usable assessments with rich classifying metadata, as well as other content. The source has to be publishable to a variety of formats, including print, EPUB, HTML, and possibly SCORM-based delivery as well.

While an eLearning-specific system is probably convenient and useful for authoring it is necessarily going to be limited to only that use case, just as any special-purpose system is.

The use of DITA (and generic XML more generally) is predicated on a need, either current or near-term future, to use the content in a variety of ways, many of which may not currently be known.

Also, the focus of DITA is on content, not delivery, as those are two separate areas of concern. The requirements for authoring and the requirements for delivery are often very different, so there is usually a presumption of authoring in a more general way and then generating the deliverables as needed.

Cheers,

E.

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Eliot Kimber

[Patrick Leevers]

"Teaching is all about delivery. Content is usually readily available in books, articles and research papers.
A good teacher is not one who knows all the facts or where they can be found but is someone who can package up the facts into a curated and digestible package that learners are willing to spend time and money to get.

Being able to access facts held and maintained in DITA topics is more interesting to me than using DITA to describe delivery."

Ron

Books, articles and research papers are indeed more readily available than I could ever have dreamed as a student, and I agree that it's important to maintain the distinction between these primary sources and teaching materials. I wouldn't advocate writing a STEM book, article or research paper in DITA; like many colleagues, I'd use LaTeX -- as I'm doing today -- or, under duress, Word.

IMHO lecture notes are entirely different, and students generally dislike lecture notes which resemble desktop-published primary sources. 

As engineers we put a lot of effort into trying to instill professional attitudes in students and in drawing them into a community of practice. But there are still many concepts to be understood, many tasks and techniques to be mastered and facts to be learned. Packaging these topics in a self-contained, shareable, modular form has a lot to commend it.  Publishing them as lecture notes does work well, especially if they are so concise that students really need to interact with them -- i.e. annotate them, preferably by hand -- as part of an active learning process.

With my thousands of DITA topics now written, I agree completely that wrapping them into SCORM packages with some self-assessment interactions should be not only just a small step but also an extremely useful one. If XSLT didn't hate me so much I might have finished the SCORM plugin myself, but fortunately for us there's Eliot…

You might also be interested in this approach (I certainly was):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l7hpfSfnP4

Cheers
Pat
 
They are different, but more closely related, to eLearning. We spend a lot of time

On Friday, 27 January 2017 16:02:01 UTC, guillaume SEJOURNE wrote: