DITA and learning content

One of our 2024 trends was an increased interest in structured content for learning—classroom training materials, e-learning, and more—and even DITA-based learning content.

With this in mind, we have some new initiatives for 2025.

Learning and Training specialization

The DITA Learning and Training (L&T) specialization provides a foundation for learning content. It includes elements for lessons and several different question types for assessments. We are adding new specializations to L&T to fill in a few gaps, especially around new question types.

To support this work, we’ve set up a fork of the L&T specialization in GitHub. If you’re working on DITA learning content, we invite you to participate in these updates.

(The process of contributing to the OASIS-official L&T content is a bit complex, so we’re starting with our own fork.)

LearningDITA updates

We are anticipating the eventual release of DITA 2.0, so we’re refreshing LearningDITA.com. We expect to:

• Move the site to a new tech stack. Our current system is a combination of WordPress and LearnDash LMS, and it’s starting to fray around the edges. This is probably related to the 9,000 people that signed up for LearningDITA.com in calendar 2024.
• Add new courses for DITA 2.0. We do not intend to retire the DITA 1.3 courses anytime soon, so we’ll likely have DITA 2.0 courses running in parallel with the DITA 1.3 courses. The updates for DITA 2.0 are in progress in the LearningDITA GitHub repository. We welcome your contributions there, as well.
• Introduce a time limit on free accounts. We need to control hosting costs, and the number of users in the database is a primary contributor to those costs. We’re still working out the details, but the plan is that registrants will get free access for at least 30 days. After that, they will likely need to upgrade to a paid tier. If your organization wants ongoing access to LearningDITA.com and you don’t want to rely on free accounts, please reach out and let us know what sort of an offering would be useful to you.

DITA to SCORM

To move LearningDITA content from DITA into an LMS, we’re going to need some sort of intermediate format, maybe SCORM. A lot depends on the tech stack we pick for LearningDITA.com. Watch this space for more information, and if you either need DITA-to-LMS or have already solved this problem, let us know!