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More Flexibility and better Metrics for Help

E-Learning needs explaining. More so when it is presented on such a powerful yet complex LMS like ILIAS.

The Help is here to provide instant and automatic relieve. It is working great for its users, but it needs to get even better: It needs to catch user attention faster and adapt better to local ILIAS settings and plug-ins. In order to make best use of the output from the Online Help team, it also should provide more data on which modules require more extensive help screens.

1 Features

1.1 Make the Help adapt better to local ILIAS settings and plug-ins

Get Persisting IDs 
Many Screen-IDs broke with ILIAS 6. We will have great changes again and this should be prevented in the future. 

• Persisting Help IDs

Adapting to Configuration 
The help must know which services that are switched on and which are switched off and suppress content accordingly. 

• Suppressing Chapters if Functionality is deactivated

Locally Customisable Help 

Educational providers should be able to customise the help package, i.e. change or add texts or add video. 

• Customizable Online Help Packages
• Introducing IDs for Help Pages

Help Packages for Plugins 

Educational providers should be able to import additional help packages for the plugins they deploy. There is a Suggested Process for Preparing Plugin Help packages. 

• ILIAS can handle several help packages

1.2 Make the Help more approachable

Guided Tour 
Upon first login users are taken on a guided tour to familiarize themselves with ILIAS.                                                                       

• Guided Tour

Better connecting Help and Support
The Help-me Plugin delivers a good service and we think about incoproating something similar for the trunk.
 

1.3 Data on usage and experience

Data-based CIP
What help pages were called and how often? Administrators could track the use and decide whether to share the data with the Editorial Team.  If we knew which texts are most used we could trim them.  

• Usage Intensity of Help 

Gathering Feedback 
Users could provide administrators with feedback on the quality of the help. 

2 Editorial Process

Inspiration for the changes is the editorial concept of performance support. PPS conceptualises user needs and respective content needs as follows:

'Moments of Need‘ of users	Types of Content	Prepwork?
New - user uses ILIAS for the first time	Guided Tours, automatic demo	no existing text
More - user becomes acquainted with ILIAS core concepts	Concept Intros	some text exist need editing and completion
Apply - users get help in using ILIAS	Step-by-step help text, checklists for preparing and more complex jobs	mostly there
Solve -  user have issues in operating ILIAS and tackle them	Info on possible strategies to solve	no existing text
Change - users get infos on changes and updates	Info and highlights	no existing text

The Editorial Team envisages to complete the follwoing work packages over the next 3 years: 

1. Analysing Target Groups We will take the following approaches to rearach the target groups

   • Conducting interviews and thus capture goals, attitudes and tasks of actual users. 
   • Counting prevalence of object types on actual productive platforms
   • Taking stock of tickets of support teams: What are important issues? 

2. Anaylsing Tasks We want to arrive at a list of important and critical tasks.

3. Anaylsing and Mapping Core Concepts We want to arrive at a map associating core concepts with critical tasks of certain target groups. 

4. Revising the Editorial Guidelines The Editorial Guidelines need to be adapted to new types of content.

5. Re-working Existing Texts, Perparing new Content Over the next few years we will work on the texts and bring them into thenew formats. 

6. Evaluate and Improve We will evaluate the approach and its results and adapot accordingly.