DAV wiki and Documentation

At UTP, we needed a way to centralize all the course design information and workflows focused on the generation of online courses in one single place. My proposal consisted of creating a wiki with all this information. Over time, I’ve redesigned the wiki twice, and it gets updates and expansions every 4-5 months.

Context

UTP’s Dirección de Aprendizaje Virtual had many documents and guidelines scattered throughout our OneDrive folders. Many of these documents were linked to each other and were updated regularly, but there was no way to find them all in one single place. Because of this mess, documents were often edited accidentally, moved, duplicated or even deleted, which made it difficult to understand and navigate all this information, especially for a new team member.

Goals

In this case, my goal was fairly straightforward. I wanted to create a centralized space that served as a repository for all these documents of guidelines and processes, allowing us to update and socialize the material when needed, while also determining ownership and editing permissions for different documents. It should be easy to search, update and integrate into our existing workflow. I had (and still have) no dashboard to measure them, but if I could reduce the amount of bad-document-induced-headaches in my team, I'd consider it a massive success.

How I built it

This is where I bring up the fact that I only wrote about this project about 2 years after I actually first started work on it. The wiki, at this point, has already gone through one massive move and two rewrites, as well as many, many updates. At the time I started it, however, I didn't think about the site map super hard. I took the basic division of guidelienes we had at the time (course design, visual design and video editing) and added a home and a couple extra pages for context or for super important processes that weren't contained in the guidelines. I also hosted it on Sharepoint, I guess because... it was available. It kind of sucked.

I'd rather talk about the second implementation a little more, because it was the better thought out attempt and the result was much nicer.

On this attempt, our workflow had gained some complexity and our team had grown substantially. So the structure for the wiki was cleaned up and redesigned with one specific goal in mind: to explain and give clear and simple instructions on how to achieve X at an acceptable quality standard - X being whatever large or little part of the course production our team happened to be workig on at the time. Why? because that was the main reason why our team liked the parts of the old wiki they liked. Everything else was kind of, self serving slop. So once again I focused mainly on the course design process but changed the tone from my usual boring dry instructional, fill-the-entire-page-with-text-style, to something a little friendlier, faster paced and chock full of straight-to-the-point tutorials (in text and video format! This took FOREVER). Eventually I'd also have enough time to add pages for more general information about the team, some company policies and other things that should be written down. So far, the page with information on how to actually use PTO has the most visits. I even recorded a little tutorial for it!

But I digress. It was at this time that I also made the decision to move the wiki from Sharepoint to Notion. I had happened upon Notion on some generic Twitter thread about boosting productivity and whatnot, and since it was working very well for me to keep track of personal and work projects, I figured "hey, why not use this thing for work too". I sort of regret it now because I still can't get my team to pay for a group membership and so I have to mess with the page permissions individually every time I wanna add or remove someone to/from the wiki, but everything else about it is pretty great. Yay.

Generally speaking, the wiki is probably one of the most impactful projects I've worked on. It gets brought up on normal conversations at the office and it's become a completely normal and necessary part of our production process. My team knows to rely on it, which in my opinion is the best sign of its success. I doubt it will be going away any time soon.