The benefits for companies learning with Markdown

The benefits for companies learning with Markdown
Corey J Hynes from LODS explains how Markdown has become the standard for companies

Caspar Herzberg |


This article first appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of The Record.

Thousands of companies rely on Markdown documents to maintain documentation. Why Markdown? It’s a very simple language to learn and understand, and a simple text editor is all you need. There are varying standards, but all use the same core elements making the portability of Markdown excellent. This makes it ideal for documentation that can be rendered and delivered in any number of ways, across many different platforms. Chances are if you are a technical writer, you have worked with Markdown.

Learn on Demand Systems has taken Markdown one step further, bringing it to the world of training and education by putting it at the heart of Lab on Demand.

Lab on Demand Cloud Slice gives customers the ability to provide transient access to Microsoft Azure without the need for sign-ups and registrations. This enables anyone with basic Azure skills to quickly configure an Azure environment and use the ARM template to create repeatable deployments for training.

Behind the scenes, we needed to make it just as easy to create media rich, highly interactive training documentation. Markdown provided the solution.

Lab on Demand extends the traditional Markdown syntax to include a set of training specific extensions that we call Integrated Digital Learning-MarkDown (IDL-MD). With IDL-MD, anyone with rudimentary documentation skills can quickly and easily write compelling hands-on instructions for any software product or any cloud platform.

Significant advancements include the ability to copy Markdown from any documentation site, and simply modify it in the editor. Rather than copying, your training material can use ‘includes’, which pull in live documentation in real time. No more updating the training when the documentation changes.

The documentation also now understands your live learning environment via @lab replacement tokens, and can provide readers with instructions specifically tailored to their experience. No more placeholder text. What’s more, copy/paste is all that is required to add screenshots or videos to your documentation. The editor automatically uploads and stores these behind the scenes.

If you are a subject matter expert in any topic, you can leverage the simplicity of Markdown to create media rich, dynamic and immersive training manuals, leveraging existing published documentation, in a very short time. Paired with the cloud orchestration tools in Lab on Demand, and any cloud technical expert has a toolset to quickly build and deliver custom training, without lengthy development time or complex maintenance cycles, to be delivered at any scale, on any device.

We believe IDL-MD will transform cloud technical learning, so much so that all Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and Certified Trainers (MCTs) have complimentary access to this toolset to build and deliver their own training courses using hands-on Microsoft Azure exercises, written and delivered using IDL-MD.

The cloud changes quickly. Building tools that enable all experts, not just those focused on training, to build dynamic learning experiences, will change how professionals learn in the cloud era.

Corey J Hynes is the CEO and chief product architect for Learn on Demand Systems

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