Project Background

In times past, technical publications and instruction were developed separately. While technical publications and instruction presented overlapping content, the two sources were created and managed separately. This is wasteful. When the equipment changes, both the technical publications and the instruction had to be changed. This doubled the work for overlapping content, and meant that the technical publications and instruction could well be out-of-synchrony. 

The integration of instruction and technical publications is desirable for two principle reasons: cost savings and timeliness. When content is shared, changing the content once results in revised technical publications and instruction, saving duplicate effort, and reducing cost. Changing shared content means that one change updates both technical publications and instruction, ensuring timeliness.

The training community benefits from accessing technical publications by maintaining relevance and integrity of their products. The technical data community desires access to learning and training information for completeness of their products.

Technical publications and instruction have been developed separately for a number of reasons. Traditionally, these two sources have been created and managed separately due to organizational boundaries. More recently, the technical publications and instruction in the military have adopted different have adopted different specifications, SCORM for instruction, and S1000D for technical publications.

It is the intent of this project to support the integration of technical publications and instruction to reduce cost, improve timeliness, and increase human effectiveness. 

Objectives

To support the development of integrated technical publications and instruction using S1000D and SCORM:

• Create demonstrations that effectively integrate technical publications and instruction 
• Develop approaches and methods to integrate technical publications and instruction
• While developing these methods and demonstrations, identify emerging challenges, and suggest approaches to overcome them
• Develop recommendations and guidance for projects planning to develop integrated technical publication and instruction solutions
• Provide helpful background knoweledge for those interested in learning more about integrated technical publications and instruction

Project Plan

The S1000D-SCORM Testbed will provide examples of how life cycle cost savings for systems can result from building a trusted source database that generates both technical publications (e.g. Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals a.k.a. IETMs) and instructional content. Using the tools and data sources that partners and government agencies provide, we will develop a series of test cases - trusted common source data bases that will feed both IETMs and instruction. From this process, we shall derive "best practices" business rules, as well as technical solutions that build upon the tools contributed to the testbed. We will contribute recommended changes to the standards committees of S1000D and SCORM, as needed, to make the integrated use of these two standards easier to achieve. We have composed a team of information architects with expertise in S1000D, SCORM, computer engineering, technical publications, and instruction to perform this work.

The use cases that this team shall develop will be of progressively greater complexity. Thus, for each case, we shall work through a process of elaborating the technical architecture to support the requirements of a more complicated use case. The architecture shall form the basis of a software implementation plan. These plans shall specify custom code to integrate existing software tools with the SCORM & S1000D standards. After software planning, we will develop and test this software. Below we give overviews of the Use Cases completed; the reports are available at Use Cases on this web site. 

Use Case: Integrating S1000D Content in Instruction

In this Use Case, we explore how content in S1000D technical publications could be embedded in instruction.  We developed a method in which S1000D content could be specified, and then inserted into HTML instruction. 

Use Case: Equipment Version Specificity for training

In this Use Case, we explore how instruction could be tailored to the version of the equipment that the student must learn about. We developed a method in which a student profile is fed to SCORM Simple Sequencing to tailor instruction to the student's specific equipment.

Use Case: Selecting CSDB Given User Profile

In this Use Case, we explore how content from different CSDBs could be pulled and embedded in instruction. We developed a method by which the learner’s profile is used in Web Services to find the appropriate CSDB; then content is pulled from the CSDB, and inserted into instruction. For this Use Case, we wish to thank two S1000D SCORM testbed partners for contributing their CSDBs in this development, XY Enterprises Content@ and Corena's Life*S1000D

Use Case: Finding Content in ADL-R

In this Use Case, we explore how to find training content that is related to IETMs. We developed a method in which training content metadata would explicitly state the S1000D Data Modules it used; then, the training content registries could be searched for metadata linking the training to S1000D content that is embedded in the training.   

Use Case: Proto Content

In this Use Case, we explore how technical publications and instruction could both be derived from a more primitive trusted source database. For this Use Case, we wish to thank Xerox for providing publicly viewable technical publications, and Data Conversion Laboratory, for converting Xerox content into S1000D.