Course objectives Textbooks Course policies Grading plan Course schedule Course resources

Overview of Course Objectives Online Helps & Help-Authoring Tools is a workshop-style course in which you study the evolution and function of online helps; critique existing online helps; learn structuring principles and navigation tools common in online helps; create online helps using several leading online help-authoring tools such as RoboHELP and AuthorIT; and write your own online helps for a software product. This course is still a writing course: you'll focus on audiences, organization, content, transitions, format, and good writing in general throughout. This course depends on your knowledge of some basic word-processing skills and your willingness to learn more. You'll be learning to use at least one help-authoring application and producing documents with headings, bulleted and numbered lists, graphics, tables, and indexes. If you do not own a computer, you can use the computers in NRG 4209 which are equipped with RoboHelp 9, authorIT (evaluation version), Doc-To-Help, and other help-authoring software and are open many hours a week. If you believe that your word-processing skills are not at level suitable for this course, contact your instructor. Here's what we are up to this course: Audience & task analysis. Practice analyzing the needs of various readers (end users, administrators, technicians), at various levels (novice, intermediate, expert), for various purposes (to persuade, to inform, to instruct, to warn, to refer), and for the tasks they need to accomplish their work. Online documentation strategies. Learn concepts involved in book design and related strategies for preparing online information. Online help-authoring applications. Learn how to use help-authoring software like RoboHelp or AuthorIT to develop industry-standard online helps. Please note that this course is not a training course for RoboHelp or AuthorIT. You learn enough RoboHelp or AuthorIT to be able to produce online helps with it—and that's a lot! Screen design, style, mechanics. Review the basics of formatting (lists, headings, notices, highlighting, typography, screen design, color), mechanics (numbers, symbols, abbreviations, acronyms, terminology), and common sentence-style problems. Graphics. Learn how to plan, design, and create graphics for communicating technical information online. Conversions. Learn how to create helps from information in other media, for example, from Word or FrameMaker documents, as well as web pages. Note: Online Helps & Help-Authoring Tools is a vigorous, rapid-paced course. Be ready to work fast, hard, and smart. Do your best to keep up! Textbooks: Required & Supplemental There are no textbooks out there that you need to purchase. There are quite a number of resources online and free. See the resources page for this course. These titles have been ordered for the course but there is no certainty they will be available at ACC bookstores and I cannot yet vouch for their quality: Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications. We will use the help-file version of this resource. Before you purchase this item, contact your instructor on how to get the correct copy of this help file. Webber, Granor. Is the Help Helpful?: How to Create Online Help That Meets Your Users' Needs. Hentzenwerke ISBN 1930919603. Course Policies Class participation and related activity: Please come to class: we will work through tutorials and practice exercises with help-authoring applications, discuss theory and strategies for delivery online information, project requirements, and more; and, no doubt, change due dates and requirements now and then. If you miss class, it's your responsibility to catch up. Schedule changes: It's very likely that there will be minor changes to the schedule as the semester goes along. It's your responsibility to stay informed. Course-related activity: Expect to spend an average 4 to 6 hours a week doing readings, writing assignments, learning software, and researching hardware. Pace of the course: Some of the key goals in this course are to get you thoroughly introduced to help-authoring software and to get you to produce industry-standard help files. The knowledge, skills, and portfolio items you gain from this course will be absolutely essential to you in getting employed as a professonal technical communicator. To accomplish these goals, our course must be vigorous and fast-paced. Be prepared to work hard, work fast, and work smart. Do your best! Late papers: No credit will be given to late work. However, you are allowed one mishap based on Murphy's Law. Use of computer hardware and software: You are not expected to own any specialized software or hardware: the TCM lab at NRG 4209 has help-authoring software and graphics software. Help-authoring software: Luckily, you can get an evaluation copy of any of the leading help-authoring applications and use it for as long as you need. RoboHelp and AuthorIT put their advertisements randomly in any help project you compile with the evaluation versions. Not great for paying clients, but okay for our course. Please note that this course is not a RoboHelp- or AuthorIT-training course. Instead, it is a technical documentation course that features help-authoring software. Revisions: You can revise any assignment once in order to get a higher grade. Your highest revision grades are used to calculate your final grade for the course. You are not obligated to revise assignments. Use of computer hardware and software: You need not own a computer or have special word-processing software. However, you need to have, or develop during the semester, word-processing skills that include such elements as headings; bulleted and numbered lists; headers and footers; automated cross-referencing, tables of contents, and indexes; use of bold, italics, and other fonts. The class will introduce most of these skills; see me for other needs in this area. Computer knowledge: You must have a solid end-user familiarity with computers and Windows to do well in this course. You need to be comfortable with creating, editing, saving siles; creating directories (folders); moving files to different directories; and so on. Be willing to learn, ask questions, and do the necessary research to support your documentation projects. Graphics: You need not have any skills as a graphics artist is this course. You can cut and paste, scan, trace, use clip art anything that will get something resembling the artwork you need for your documentation projects. One of the units in the course will introduce you to basic graphics techniques. Practice & quick checks: The practice items are meant to gently encourage you learn as you go rather than at the last minute when you are face to face with a big project. You show these these practices items to your instructor (or end them by e-mail attachment) who gives you full credit if you've done the activity satisfactorily. Plagiarism: Using other people's written work as if it were your own can result in an F for the course and expulsion from the college. You are expected to have read and understood the current issue of ACC's Student Handbook and Academic Handbook for information about procedures and about what constitutes scholastic dishonesty. Extra help: If you need help understanding the concepts in this course, thinking of writing projects, getting access to computers, using the software, producing professional-looking documents, handling basic writing matters (such as parallelism, punctuation, or subject-verb agreement), contact your instructor or post questions to the class by e-mail. Disabilities: If you have any disability or impairment that may affect your work for this course, please contact your instructor as soon as possible. Grading Plan The following explains the grading categories and their relative weights in the final grade. Please note that we may not be able to do all of the projects listed below. Get-acquainted memo and questionnaire. At the beginning of the semester, you'll write a get-acquainted memo which will be posted for the rest of the class to see; you'll also fill out a questionnaire for your instructor. Help-authoring application practice. Whichever help-authoring tool you use, you'll go through a series of practice exercises focusing on essential tasks. Simple modeling project. You'll format text and graphics in the help-authoring application of your choice so that it looks exactly like a compiled help model. Brief procedures. However much we must focus on help-authoring software, this is still primarily a writing class. You'll write at least one brief 2-page procedure: people need to practice the writing style, headings, lists, notices, highlighting, and other such areas that are common in technical publishing. Final project. Your final project in this course will be a brief help file (minimally, 3 topics) but with all the trimmings typical of a "real" help file. You can do this project as a team or solo. An important part of this project will be your project planning: you "announce" the project, provide outlines and audience descriptions, develop style and a prototype document, and submit interim drafts. Final grades will be determined this way: Category Percent Quick-refs, modeling project, formatting projects 20 Help edits, help evaluations 11 Quizzes 13 Project announce, prototype 20 Final project 36 Information and programs provided by hcexres@io.com.