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- Purpose
- to document the OOTB experience
- to document configuration options that change the OOTB experience
- to demonstrate how to accomplish common tasks
- Audience
- Faculty should be a primary audience
- Instructional designers
- Could we consider faculty as end-users and students as end-end-users?
- Faculty design choices influence student user experience
- Content
- Beginner and Advanced levels would allow a faculty member to get a quick start with the basics and then later explore the more complex features
- Conceptual Introduction - brief description of the purpose of the tool
- Task oriented instructions
- Brief (3 min?) screencast
- Annotated screenshots
2. What do users need to accomplish their tasks in Sakai?
- Big picture of what a site is (have a blueprint)
- Prompts to get started
- Performance support: job aids, hints, glossary, explanation of expected behavior
- Access to step by step documentation
- Templates
- Examples of what other faculty have done
- Shared learning contents, activities
3. How do users find
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support when they hit the wall?
- Trial and error
- Call IT for help
- Look at first page of information that they can find and glance at
- Search help by keyword
- Search using Google
4. What works in the way our documentation is organized?
- Clear step by step instructions on how to technically use the tools
- Follows the same pattern as the system (tool-centric)
5. How should the help documentation be organized?
- Tools
- Tasks
- Warnings/Booby traps/Known Issues
- Practices/Pedagogical content
- Use of a taxonomy to allow quick retrieval and navigation
6. What is the current process used to revise and improve the OOTB documentation?
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7. What are the difference between help files and other documentation?
- FAQ: What users are asking after having used the system
- Tasks: Based on workflows, not on tools (Setting up a course site vs. using Site Info, for instance)
- Help files tend to be in text, other documentation might be in document, audio, video, picture format.
8. How can we encourage the Sakai community to contribute their improvement back to the OOTB help files?
- Provide an easily editable platform for central documentation
- Provide guidance on what should be contributed back, and how
- Provide ways to point to localized documentation to supplement the core help files
- Have a vetting process in place to accept/reject contributed changes
- Make the help files easily "subscribable", customizable, exportable in multiple formats for quick local updates
9. How should we vet the quality of the OOTB help files?
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