Educational Modelling Language

EML What’s it all about

The work carried out by the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL) on educational modelling comes from an R&D project funded by the Dutch national government through their structural funds for universities. The R&D work on learning technologies is paid from these funds with the objective of innovating education through the use of ICT.
OUNL research is academic and independent of any vendor or other commercial stakeholder. Besides work on Educational Modelling Language (EML), the OUNL’s research and development activities in learning technologies include: competency based learning, new models of assessment (e.g. portfolio’s), printing on demand, and others. The main outputs are: specifications, prototypes and publications.

EML is no longer under development. EML was taken as a base to develop the IMS Learning Design specification.

EML files, DTD Schema and related articles and several outcomes can be found at the DSpace server of the Development Programme at OTEC (http://dspace.learningnetworks.org).

Brief explanation on EML

To date no comprehensive notational system exists that allows one to codify units of study (e.g. courses, course components and study programmes), in an integral fashion. EML is the first system to achieve precisely this. EML describes not just the content of a unit of study (texts, tasks, tests, assignments) but also the roles, relations, interactions and activities of students and teachers. The major EML implementation is in XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language), an internationally accepted meta-language for the structured description of documents and data.

Various kinds of specifications with which educational content may be codified are under development. Examples are initiatives taken by IMS, IEEE-LTSC, Dublin Core and ADL-SCORM. EML does not make these initiatives superfluous, nor does it run contrary to their aims. If anything, it takes many of the ideas voiced by them one step further by developing an more comprehensive notational system.

EML allows to model a variety of pedagogies for education. One may use EML to model for instance a competence based pedagogy, problem based learning, performance support, self study packages or even traditional face-to-face teaching.

When using EML there is no need to worry about the delivery mode during content development. EML guarantees that investments in content will last for a long time; because of the uniformity of notation that EML brings, an instrument for comparative research on the effectiveness of educational structures emerges. Shortly, EML ensures the interoperability, re-usability, and compatibility of learning materials in the future.

Check out this analogy between EML and musical notation. A fuller explanation of EML and its role in education may be found in the article From change to renewal: Educational technology foundations of electronic learning environments.

Real Practice

From the time the OUNL started the design of EML as the solution to educational problems (e.g. inter-operability and re-usability), the R&D programme on Learning Technologies has been engaged in repeated testing and validation of the concepts behind EML.

During this R&D phase of the EML project, companies and schools have been actively involved in pilot trials. Then after two years of internal development within the OUNL, EML version 1.0 was published in December 2000 as a free and open format for external use in education.

Now, for further engineering activities, tools for using EML are being taken up by commercial parties, but not on an exclusive basis.
Organizations wishing to build these EML tools, for instance import/export filters, are invited to do so and several companies are currently engaged in such engineering activities.

For implementation, further testing and validation, there are collaborations with other institutions, such as the Consortium Digital University in the Netherlands and Flanders, and the University of South Africa (UNISA).
The OUNL itself aims to use EML as future format for all course development.
Within the OUNL a number of courses from a variety of scientific domains have already been modelled and implemented in EML. All these pilots have produced real educational material that has been used in actual teaching practice by students and teachers. The outcomes have been thoroughly evaluated for learning effectiveness.
So, the EML as developed by the OUNL, has already proven its effectiveness and flexibility under a variety of pedagogical models and in a number of different settings (both distance learning and mixed-mode delivery).