The Edubox Learning Design Player

Part of the mission of the Open University of the Netherlands (OUNL) is to innovate in higher education to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and attractiveness of learning. New educational technologies provide one means to this end, and the university is committed to technology development and the advancement of technological knowledge. Specifications form an important category of such knowledge, as highlighted by Gibbons (2000), and OUNL devotes resources to the development of educational technology specifications. OUNL has offered on-line and blended courses for many years, and was quick to see the need to support a wide variety of pedagogical approaches and to liberate learning processes from the particular system(s) involved in their delivery. These needs led to investments in the development of specifications for describing the teaching–learning process, starting with the Educational Modelling Language (EML 2000), and continuing with the Learning Design specification (LD 2003). This chapter traces the development of the EML players before describing the current version of Edubox in its broad production context, aiming to give insight into the ways in which educational modelling has been applied in a large production context.