We had a discussion last week about a potential partnership that involves Cherryleaf’s courseware (and our trainers). It prompted us to take stock of the all courseware we can offer today. Below are some of the items on the list:
Basic/Intermediate Technical Writing
- The purpose of technical documentation
- The different models for technical documentation
- What is a technical author?
- Adopting a user-centred design approach
- Overview of the writing process
- Planning your content
- Researching the product and audience
- The information design stage
- Software tools
- Writing the topics – Overview
- Writing the topics – How to write and present different types of information
- Writing the topics – Using images and videos
- Writing the topics – Index, Search and Metadata
- Reviewing and editing
Single Sourcing and Content Reuse
- Single sourcing definitions
- What is single sourcing?
- Why single source?
- When single sourcing might be a bad idea
- Writing for re-use
- Single sourcing across documents
- Single sourcing across different media (mobile, paper etc)
- Creating variations of the same document
- The writing process
- Structured v unstructured writing
- Planning and designing single sourced content
- Authoring guidelines and style guides
- Defining information types, content types, metadata dimensions
- Content modelling and mapping
- Mapping to output type
- Publishing single sourced content
- Single sourcing software
- Introduction to DITA
- DITA fundamentals
- Introduction to DITA topics
- The base DITA topics
- The different types of DITA topics, metadata and constraints
- Organising your content – Maps
- Linking
- Embedding content – conrefs
- Conditions and filtering
- Transformations and publishing
- Future developments – Troubleshooting and Lightweight DITA
- Why does my business need to look at content strategically?
- What do we mean by content strategy?
- Meeting business goals through content
- Discovering what exists
- Content inventories
- Evaluating what exists
- Content audits
- Workflow analysis
- Audience analysis
- Developing a strategy
- The Five S model
- Implementing a strategy and systems
- Creating and publishing content
- Governance and maintenance
- Managing new content
- Maintenance
- Governance
- Benefits of policies and procedures.
- What do we mean by a policy, procedure and guideline?
- What is meant by a policy, a procedure a guideline? What would you expect to see in each of these and what not to see.
- What are the characteristics of good policies/procedures?
- Researching the product and audience
- Who is our audience? In what situation will they be reading this? What exactly do they need to know?
- How do we meet the needs of more than one audience (such as staff and auditors)?
- Planning
- Outlining and planning the document.
- How to structure and organise the content to assist users in finding what they are looking for.
- Writing the table of contents.
- Navigation flows and filtering content for multiple audiences.
- Writing the topics
- Writing a policy and a procedure.
- Using plain English – what do we mean by this? Description and examples of plain English.
- How to present different types of information
- Page layout and how this can help users find what they are looking for.
- The importance of steps in a procedure.
- Conforming to standards
- Writing documents that confirm to external standards (and might be audited).
- How to write documents that meet more than one external standard.
- Reviewing
- Steps involved in reviewing a document.
- Publishing
- Which are the best mediums for publishing procedures?
- Managing and maintaining
- Content reuse and single sourcing.
- Governance, maintenance and ownership of procedures.
- What is the traditional approach to technical writing?
- Why is change happening? Examples from Web-based software where the Help doesn’t follow the traditional approach
- New writing styles, tone and voice
- Design-led documentation
- Embedded Help
- First-user interaction Help
- Pathfinder topics
- Troubleshooting topics
- Information design and navigation structures
- Sequencing
- User generated content
- How are Citrix, IBM, Microsoft and others changing their documentation?
Embedded Help writing strategies
- What is Help?
- Adopting a user-centred design approach
- The traditional model of User Assistance
- Emerging models of User Assistance
- Types of Help
- Deciding when to use which delivery method
- Overview of the authoring tools
- Measuring if it works
- Best practice of information types
- Deciding when to break the traditional rules
- Overview of the authoring tools
- Measuring if it works
Looking at the list has led us to think about additional topics and courses we should look at developing. One might be managing projects, particularly in an Agile environment. Others are developing screencasts and basic business writing (including some grammar basics).
Training in particular software tools is problematic, as the courses need to reflect the latest version of the application.
What other courses do you think we should develop?
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