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Managing "contextless elements" as for L&T Assessments and Objectives

From: Amber Swope <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Date: Thu, 30 Nov 2017 17:05:00 -0000

Thanks for the notes, Rob and David. Many companies need to manage questions a separate units, which means that the easiest way to assemble them in a deliverable is to have separate topics and then organize them with a map. This also allows you to apply different key value to different questions in the context of a map. The L&T SC has determined that storing the questions as separate units is a requirement we need to support. As for the title discussion, I have not yet seen question title used for a publishing context. One could argue that the question stem may be relevant as a label for the topic, but question stems may be more than one paragraph and may be very generic. The real issue is that most folks don ?? t have anything to use as a label for a given question. So, I have been considering this challenge from the perspective of how folks use the topics. One of the primary use cases is assembling a collection of questions for a test. Because it is very common to have the same stem for multiple questions, the current out-of-the-box support in most editors is to display the title for the topic reference. This means that if you leave the title blank in the question topic, then the map is a list of nameless topic references. You essentially have to use a view with the resolved topics to know what you ?? re building. In many cases the order of the references isn ?? t important, but you need to know that you haven ?? t included the same question multiple times. You may also need to apply key references to specific questions so it is imperative that you know which question is referenced. For example, for a driver training course, you may have 500 topics with ?? Who has the right of way in the following traffic pattern? ?? as the question stem. What would be the label or title for these topics? If I ?? m assembling a map to test the learner ?? s knowledge about the concept of right of way, I could have 50 of these question in a map. To associate the relevant learning objective to the topic, I need to know which questions apply to which learning objective. When I consider the role that a title plays in this scenario, the issue is about what is displayed in the map rather than what is stored in the topic. I can think of several options to help with the display of relevant metadata is helpful, but none of them address the question of what, if anything, should be stored as the title or label of a question. Eliot proposed three options in the original email. Although an option, I don ?? t support the idea to directly use elements in the map. I ?? d like to investigate the first two options and any others that folks can propose. If you have other options, please contribute your suggestions. Have a great day, Amber From: [email protected] [mailto: [email protected] ] On Behalf Of Rob Hanna Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2017 7:05 AM To: David Hollis Cc: dita Subject: RE: [dita] Managing "contextless elements" as for L&T Assessments and Objectives While there are admittedly topic types where the title is not required for publishing, I think that every topic needs a label for identification and management purposes. The title plays a dual role as content and metadata (label). Could the solution be as easy as specializing a label element from title from some topic types where this is the case? I think label could be a useful substitution for title in any instance where the title is not needed for publication but still required for identification, such as sections and figures. Cheers, Rob Hanna From: [email protected] [ mailto:[email protected] ] On Behalf Of David Hollis Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2017 6:40 AM Cc: dita < [email protected] > Subject: Re: [dita] Managing "contextless elements" as for L&T Assessments and Objectives Hi Amber, Eliot, Isn't the generic DITA topic already quite "contextless"? I thought that chunking was the way to use a topic without the title? I assume there is a title somewhere, just it is not required for the "contextless" topic. This seems like a parallel to Information mapping? I would be concerned if the proposed solution would be to put content in a map, and would suggest a wider discussion about what the role of a map and a topic should be, going forward. I appreciate that metadata in a map is already used for various purposes: reuse and subject schemes, for instance. But one of the potential solutions would seem to go further than that. I acknowledge Eliot's caveats about this potential solution. There might be a parallel with resource-only "container topics", or "warehouse topics" that simply provide content for reuse. The topic itself never appears in the final document. My two penn'orth. HTH, David Thanks for the summary, Eliot. Although a single question is a unit that can be understood in isolation and used in multiple contexts, it doesn't meet the definition of a topic in that it does not natural title. This means that they fall into the gray area that you are calling ??contextless elements ??. I can't think of a better way to describe it and thank you for your suggested terminology. Because assessment and learning objectives are fundamental to learning content, we are definitely going to address this issue on the L&T SC. However, we don't want to do this in isolation, so if you have grappled with content that meets the same criteria, please share your experience with the TC. Many thanks, Amber