OUNL/EML: The work carried out by the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL) on educational modeling 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 Modeling 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.

The EML website notes that 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 a more comprehensive notational system. For additional information, see the EML site at http://eml.ou.nl/introduction/explanation.htm