E2ml a Visual Instructional Design Language

The advent of technologies has changed our very idea of what a course is (Bates & Poole, 2003). Instructors in Higher Education are now daily supported by instructional designers or educational technology experts that provide advice for integrating Web-based activities, videoconference sessions, high-quality digital media presentations, etc. in their teaching activities. The process of designing courses has grown a more and more structured and interdisciplinary process (Szabo, 2002), one that is too complex for a lone-ranger professor to cope with (Bates, 1999). In some respects, teaching is thus developing from craftsmanship to a large scale production process (Cantoni & Di Blas, 2002), in which communication has become a critical variable. A fairly recent research trend in the field of educational technology is the development of visual instructional design languages. This paper is a sort of tutorial aiming to introduce one of these new professional tools for designers: EML – Educational Environment Modeling Language. In order to explain the relevance of EML, the first section is devoted to the identification of some features and issues concerning the Instructional Design process through the analysis of the literature. The second section introduces some relevant literature, among which the foundational work by Gibbons, and two other visual design languages. EML is presented in the third section through a detailed example, while additional references concerning other studies about the language are provided in section four. The conclusion presents a summary along with indications for further work.