1 Aim of Project: Improving the Usability of the Documentation

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.

• Get Persisting IDs : Many Screen-IDs broke with ILIAS 6. We will have great changes again and this should be prevented in the future. 
• Adapting to Configuration: The help must know which services that are switched on and which are switched off and suppress content accordingly. 
• Locally Customisable Help: Educational providers should be able to customise the help package, i.e. change or add texts or add video. 
• 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. 
• Guided Tour: Upon first login users are taken on a guided tour to familiarize themselves with ILIAS.                                 
• Better connecting Help and Support: The Help-me Plugin delivers a good service and we think about incoproating something similar for the trunk.
• 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.  
  
• Gathering Feedback: Users could provide administrators with feedback on the quality of the help. 
  

2 Additional Information

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

3 Editorial Process

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 research 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.