Today we bring you another guest blog post from MadCap Software, written by Jose Sermeno, a product evangelist at MadCap.
For this month’s Notebook guest post, I wanted to take the opportunity to showcase an area of #TechComm that I’m very excited about: The MadCap Scholar Program
In our work with various educational institutions both abroad and here in the United States, we were seeing consistent trends in the groups we were talking to. The concepts and methods they were teaching certainly varied based on the strength of the curriculum—but a constant was that the technology and tools the students were mandated to develop with were generally outdated and limited.
The programs weren’t well funded, and their students were graduating without ever having practical experience working with a modern authoring program. Most programs were providing students with outdated versions of software that generally only created a single output type (DITA, PDF, or .chm). Word was the primary “editor” used—and most of their education was around the concepts and practice of technical communication—not working with XML, CSS, or single sourcing. As a software company, we quickly became committed to helping provide students with the skills and knowledge they need to create and manage today’s technical content. How could we help? By providing the students the tools necessary to understand technical communication in today’s workplace—for no cost, that’s how! Understanding the depth and complexity of software—and giving them the opportunity to work with Flare and the rest of the MadPak early on in their student life has proven to instill best practices that are essential to a student's success with a long-term career in the technical communication industry.
The response we received was resounding and the impact was immediate. We found schools from around the world clamoring for assistance with their individual programs. Using Flare's patented dynamic XML editor, technical writers were able to focus on content—without any XML programming knowledge. Content created in Flare can be published to any number of channels, including complex digital print, desktop publishing, Web-based, or mobile platforms—so it was a great avenue to introducing material such as XML and topic based authoring.
I’d encourage anyone looking to enhance their schools technical communication program to contact MadCap Software today.
For more information, check out our MadCap Scholar Program section.
Our latest MadCap Scholar Case Study: UC San Diego, Extension Uses MadCap Flare to Make Learning Technical Communications and Topic-Based Authoring Practices More Intuitive