Digital Delivery of Student and Lab Guides

Harold Henke, Ph.D. Principal, Flatirons Technical Communications [email protected]

Delivering Content Digitally

. Training organizations want to deliver content in digital format such as student and lab guides for a variety of reasons: . Go green by eliminating printing material. . Improve development cycles by just in time digital fulfillment of student materials. . Eliminate storing and shipping of printed materials. . Training organizations achieve this goal by: . Creating and fulfilling digital content in-house. . Hiring a third party to provide digital content fulfillment.

. Most prevalent method is to use Adobe Acrobat to create a digital version of the material. . Material can be secured using Adobe security including ability to enable students to make notes, annotations, and so on. Can also specify whether content can be copied and printed. Content can be password protected to prevent unauthorized changes. . Material can be secured with third party Digital Rights Management (DRM) tools to provide additional security. • DRM providers such as Armjisoft, CrypKey, LockLizard as well as Adobe Digital Editions, provide methods where users access digital content from a repository and unlock the content. • The DRM defines what tasks students can perform such as annotation, copying, printing, as well as features for content producers including printing watermarks and setting content expiration dates.

. Publish PDF files to USB drive for distribution. . DRM systems can be used to bind the content to the USB drive to prevent copying or unauthorized distribution. . Publish PDF files to Learning Management System for student access. . Students enroll in the course before the course is started to download their digital student and lab guides. (Can also provide student and lab guides for eLearning courses as well with this method.) . Other than access to content via course enrollment, no additional security is provided for the content. DRM is needed to protect the content if Acrobat Security is not sufficient. . Publish PDF files and distribute to students in class. . Assumes existing Acrobat security is satisfactory.

. Fulfillment companies, like Gilmore Global, provide fulfillment of printed materials as well as digital materials. . Digital materials, typically PDFs, can be sent to the fulfillment vendor where digital rights are applied, the content is stored, and students can order the content from the training provider and obtain the content from the fulfillment provider.

What are eBooks and the Super Lab Guide

. A student guide created in Adobe FrameMaker and published as an Adobe Acrobat file is an eBook just as is Suzanne Collin’s novel, Hunger Games, available as an Amazon Kindle eBook. The difference is primarily how the content was created and protected. . For Acrobat eBooks, applications like FrameMaker, Microsoft Word, and Adobe InDesign provide the ability to create eBooks in Acrobat format. The key attribute of a PDF eBook is the fidelity of the output to the printed page. . For content that includes command line output, tables, and complex graphics, the fidelity of PDF to the printed page is hard to surpass for readability and comprehension. . Another factor is the security applied to the content. Many training developers are fine with the built-in security provided with Acrobat or use third-party provides for additional security. But with eBooks such as the Hunger Games, user and publisher rights must be met which can include the ability to preview content and borrow content.

. As stated above, delivery is the key to what kind of eBook you need to produce. If your audience is reading your eBook on their workstation, laptop, or tablet and they have access to Adobe Acrobat Reader, your delivery method is simple. . But if your audience wants to read your content on their Amazon Kindle, Apple iPad or iPhone, or Barnes and Noble Nook reader, then you need to publish the content in one of these formats: . azw (Amazon Kindle) . ibooks (Apple iPad and iPhone) . epub (Barnes and Noble Nook) 1

. The idea of the super lab guide was to present the answers and output to all tasks in the lab guide. The reason was to support students who could not attend an instructor led training or virtual instructor led training course but who had access to the equipment described in the lab guide. . This would also include students who were enrolled in an eLearning course which did not include simulated labs. . For every task, whether performed from a command line or graphical user interface, students would be presented the steps, the results, and answers to lab questions. . The Super Lab Guide went one step further by providing some of the output in the form of simulated lab environment where the action was performed with the product, captured, and then displayed as a demonstration to the student within the PDF eBook. . Additionally, interactive quizzes were included to help students recall information learned from the lab exercises.

. With the release of the Adobe Technical Communication Suite 3.0/3.5 (TES), course developers can create interactive eBooks utilizing Adobe PDF and Flash technology. . The TES contains two applications that can be used together to create and display interactive demonstrations within a PDF: Adobe FrameMaker 10.0 and Captivate 5.5.

• From the FrameMaker, menu, you can choose to start Adobe Captivate, insert a Captivate demo (SWF) or edit an existing demo.

• When you insert a Captivate demo, the demo fits within a anchored frame and a start button is presented to the user.

• The user controls the demonstration within the PDF file using the user controls provided by Captivate as part of the SWF package.

. Once the Captivate (SWF) is added to the FrameMaker file, you save the FrameMaker file as a PDF. . When the user opens the PDF, they can locate the demonstration which appears as a graphic with a start button. The user then selects the start button to launch the Captivate SWF. . The Captivate SWF uses the user controls you specified in your Captivate file and for all intents and purposes, the Captivate SWF is the same as if you had launched the Captivate SWF outside of the PDF. . Note: in testing SWFs created by other applications, there appeared to be issues with launching the demonstration within the PDF, therefore the above information only applies to FrameMaker and Captivate.