LearningDITA: four years later

If you had told me in July 2015 that LearningDITA would have 10 courses and be available in three languages, I wouldn’t have believed you. Since the site’s initial launch, it’s grown from a single course to a major resource for those who need to learn to use DITA.

LearningDITA.com provides free e-learning courses on the foundational aspects of DITA. Each lesson includes instructions, practice exercises, and quizzes to test your knowledge, supplemented with additional resources.

As we celebrate four years of LearningDITA, here’s a look at some metrics:

• 10 courses that cover DITA authoring, publishing, reuse, and more
• 7,222 users
• $560,000 of training value delivered (based on more than 5,600 courses completed)
• Content also available in Chinese and German

Why LearningDITA?

We developed LearningDITA because we saw a major gap in the information available about DITA: nothing was designed for new DITA users. The free resources you could find through an online search assumed some prior knowledge of DITA. We wanted to provide an entry point for those with no DITA experience to get started.

Many of our clients also required training after adopting DITA. By offering them a way to train themselves on the DITA basics for free, we could use limited training budgets for more customized training.

Today, LearningDITA serves a wider audience than we initially anticipated. Content creators and managers take the courses to help evaluate whether DITA may be right for them. Students use the site to build their skillset in the industry, and some colleges are even making the courses part of their curriculum for tech writers. If you need free training to build a solid foundation in DITA, LearningDITA is the perfect resource for you!

LearningDITA’s growth

Our goal with LearningDITA wasn’t just to offer free training, but to build a community for DITA users. Since the beginning, we’ve developed course content on the open-source LearningDITA GitHub project. We encourage contributions to LearningDITA—our courses on reuse contain contributed material. If you’re interested in writing a course or have an idea for one you’d like to see, let us know.

We also welcome translations of the LearningDITA course content into other languages. Thanks to Parson and TC China, LearningDITA is available in German at learningdita.de and Chinese at learningdita.cn.

It’s not just contributors and translators who have helped make LearningDITA what it is today. LearningDITA wouldn’t be possible without the support of our sponsors, whose generosity has helped this resource grow. We recently added new sponsor benefits. If you’re interested in sponsoring LearningDITA, please contact us!

LearningDITA Live

Once we had a solid selection of courses on LearningDITA, we decided to try something different: a free online conference featuring webinars on DITA. We hosted the first LearningDITA Live event in 2018.

In the past two years, LearningDITA Live has offered over 30 sessions on a variety of topics to over 1,700 registrants. You can watch recordings of all the sessions from the 2018 and 2019 events for free on the LearningDITA site.  

In addition to the annual online event, we have started a LearningDITA Live Series of webinars. Don’t miss out on our next session!

Moving forward

Given all this positive change, it’s clear LearningDITA is here for the long haul. We want to keep growing this resource, and we could use your input.

What would you like to see more of on LearningDITA? What topics do you think we should cover in future courses or LearningDITA Live webinars? Leave a comment and tell us what you think!