Courseware development using a single source approach

Producing user documentation will become more and more challenging in the future, since it involves not only coping with the overwhelming array of new releases and software products appearing periodically, but also with the increasing demand for software tutorials, i.e., courseware that enables the user to learn about the basic tool features and exploratively learn additional features. Single Source Publishing is a well established approach for efficiently producing, maintaining, and publishing user documentation. Its paradigm relies on the separation of content, structure, and layout of the tutorial elements. By using such an approach for learner-oriented courseware production, this paper presents development results of an ongoing project about how available user documentation might be reused for courseware production by transforming profiled DocBook files into IMS Learning Design (IMS LD) files, which are then used for modeling the learning flow within a software tutorial. The development process is described by means of a detailed example.