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Hmm. The content may be relevant for self-paced training, depending on
what it is, but you need to start with an instructional analysis that
yields objectives - or cut straight to the objectives if they are
obvious.
What are the users supposed to learn or do? Is there material in the
online help that teaches them how to do those things? Is there material
in the online help that conveys whatever background or concepts underlie
the tasks?
So you'd have to:
1) decide what the customers are supposed to learn or do
2) make a quick pass to see if suitable material is already available
3) estimate what's missing (whether by outlining or some other method)
4) see if there's someone (possibly you) who knows the information
that's missing
5) explain how long it will take and what kind of reviews it needs and
so on
6) get approval of the plan
7) do it (passing over any practical problems in extracting the online
help text into usable form here, not to mention possible recasting for a
different tone or level of detail)
8) review it
9) test it
And so on.
If all you need is to organize a bunch of separate steps into a coherent
set of tasks, it may not be all that much work. But I suspect there's
more involved.
- Jessica, instructional designer and technical writer
-----Original Message-----
From:
techwr-l-bounces+jessica -dot- weissman=hillcrestlabs -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+jessica -dot- weissman=hillcrestlabs -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr
-l.com] On Behalf Of Donna Marino
Sent: Wednesday, September 16, 2009 2:27 PM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Turning online help into training materials
My client wants me to create self-paced training materials for our
customers using online help content that already exists. Has anyone done
this? If so, can you offer suggestions about the best way to proceed?
Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices. http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/
Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/
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