eLML - eLesson Markup Language / News: Recent posts

The first of a the two Google Summer of Code projects publishes first results today. Student Thomas Linowsky was working hard to create a first beta release of his Template Builder tool. With this tool you can create easily templates for eLML. The tool is WYSIWYG and webbased with means that you can create your eLML-templates using any modern webbrowser.

Feel free to download this tool and try it out. You will find a documentation inside the ZIP-package you download. We would be happy to receive any feedback since the project is running until mid-August 2008. Please contact Thomas directly to discuss problems or send feature requests:
thomas.linowsky@s2004.tu-chemnitz.de... read more

We are happy to announce that eLML is one of the finalists running for the European MedidaPrix (100'000 Euros) which will be awarded at the GMW Conference in Austria on September 18th. More information can be found here:
http://www.medidaprix.org/projekte/finalistinnen-2008
http://www.gmw08.at/

Furthermore eLML (together wth OLAT) is participating at ISPRS' "Computer Assisted Teaching CONtest" CATCON. eLML will be presented on Wednesday 9th of July at the ISPRS conference in Beijing:
http://www.isprs2008-beijing.org/catcon.htm

Google Summer of Code officially started on May 26th. The University of Zurich received a total of 8 funded projects, six for OLAT and two for eLML. The two projects are:
1. eLML template generator by Thomas Linowsky
2. eLML to DocBook converter by Alberto Sanz

Please contact either the eLML team or the students directly if you are interested in one of these projects. We would like to stress that beta-testers are always welcome! For further information please visit the olat.org website or the Google website directly:
http://www.olat.org/website/en/html/about_participating.html
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/uzh/about.html

The video streams and podcasts of all the OLAT conference presentations are online. You will find the links together with galleries, slides etc. on the olat.org website. As for eLML there was one presentation (in German! We might offer a translation in English soon...) about the basics of eLML by Joël Fisler on Friday 28th of March, 2008. You will find four different versions (Podcast, full resolution download, QuickTime stream and Flash stream) on the conference website:
http://www.olat.org/website/en/html/about_conference.html ... read more

The University of Zurich is a mentor organization at the Google Summer of Code initiative. Therefore students can submit proposals for eLML projects and get a $5000 grant from Google for successfully completed project. The deadline for submitting an application is March 31st, 2008. The actual work would have to be done from May 26st to August 18th, 2008. For further information please read the GSoC-FAQ at http://code.google.com/soc/2008/uzh/about.html

The final program for the OLAT conference 2008 is online and can be downloaded at http://www.olat.org/conference
There will be a one-day workshop about eLML on Wednesday, March 26th and the release/presentation of the new eLML WYSIWYG frontend on Friday, March 28th 2008. The presentation is part of a session about "Content Creation" and will also present other solutions based on XML or CMS. We would be happy to welcome many eLML-users at the conference.... read more

In March 2008 (26th to 28th) the University of Zurich will host the first international OLAT (see http://www.olat.org\) open source LMS conference. eLML will also be discussed there since the University of Zurich uses eLML to create eLesson and then imports it into their LMS OLAT. On the first day there will be an eLML one-day pre-conference workshop. Then there might also be a presentation about eLML and its new WYSIWYG editor. It is not sure yet if the editor will be release before the conference or if this is the right place for a release.... read more

We were very happy to read in Stephen Downes (eLearning researcher and specialist from Canada) blog that eLML is a "A first-class job, something some other organizations could learn from." His question "Why didn't IMS or ADL or anyone else come up with something like this?" was something we were also asking ourselves over five years ago and was one of the main motivations for creating eLML. Here's the full blog entry:
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=42034

Next Wednesday and Thursday (September 19./20. 2007) the OpenExpo takes place in Zurich (http://www.openexpo.ch). On both days you can listen to interesting speeches about free and open source software with a business-focus on Wednesday and a technology-focus on Thursday. Together with OLAT (www.olat.org) we will have a booth/stand from 9am to 5pm with information about eLML. Come and visit us!

The eLearning project Psychopathology Taught Online (PTO) wins the public-price of MedidaPrix 2007 (http://www.medidaprix.org). PTO is a University of Zurich project realized with eLML. Congratulations from the eLML-team!

I am very happy to finally (with some delays, sorry...) announce the eLML 4 release! Together with eLML 4 we relaunch the eLML website http://www.elml.ch with a lot of new examples, manuals, screenshots and tutorial movies.

Here's the eLML 4 main new feature list:

- Possibility to transform multiple lessons into one course
(http://www.elml.ch/website/en/html/output_multiple.html)

- Create multiple choice quizzes with the new selfCheck element
(http://www.elml.ch/website/en/html/manual_elements.html#elements_selfcheck.html)... read more

The bad news: Unfortunately the eLML tutorial had to be cancelled because there were not enough participants registered. The good news: The eLearning project PTO (Psychopathology Taught Online, see http://www.pto.uzh.ch\) created with eLML reached the Medida Prix final! All the best from the eLML team.

Joël Fisler, one of the main eLML developers, will be at the GMW in Hamburg. If you have questions about eLML or would like a short demo feel free to contact him at joel.fisler@id.uzh.ch.

Today the latest edition of the journal ZInfo (Zeitschrift der Informatikdienste der Universität Zürich) published an article in German about eLML. If you are interested to read about what eLML is and how it work in German, please have a look at:
http://www.id.uzh.ch/cl/zinfo/zinfo0023/katprojekt/elml.html

We are currently still working on eLML release 4 and hope to be finished within the next two weeks. The ongoing discussions about if and how to add context information takes more time then we thought...

The University of Zurich is looking for a student from Zurich or surroundings who would be interested in realizing projects with eLML. In the current position available the University of Zurich is looking for someone who could create an XSLT stylesheet to transform eLML lessons into both the OOXML (Microsoft Office 2007) and the ODF (Open Office) format. Know-How in XML and XSLT would be advisable but is not required. If possible, a long-term collaboration would be desirable (at least until the students end of studies). For further information please read the job description in German at:
http://www.telejob.ch/telejob/offer_pdf.pdf?offer=8804

The eLesson Markup Language is becoming more and more popular at the University of Zurich and other Higher Education Institutions throught Switzerland and the number of projects working with eLML is growing. With growing popularity the amount of resources put into this XML structure is also growing. Currently on the developer release there are some new features available or under construction:
- Latex transformation (an alternative for creating PDFs without using XSL-FO)
- Transform multiple lessons into one course with consistent navigation and numbering
- A new element to create self-check quizzes is under development
- It will be able to add context information to certain elements to offer in-depth knowledge or background information... read more

Today the latest eLML version 3.1 was released. Since there are some XMLSchema changes, we chose to use version 3.1 instead of 3.0x. The eLML Schema now allows you to use:
- Table headings anywhere in tables (rows)
- Longer label names (up to 20 characters)

On the other hand we prohibited some empty elements because they could cause problems in the transformation:
- Empty clarify/look/act elements are not allowed anymore
- Empty URLs within the bibliography are also prohibited now... read more

We are happy to announce the first beta release of André Lochers OpenOffice Plugin for eLML. With this Plugin you can (without prior XML knowledge) easily create new lessons within OpenOffice and export them as valid eLML (XML) lesson files. Please note that this beta release does not allow yet the import of existing eLML lessons. This is due to the fact that some elements are not supported yet by the editor. Have a look at the compliance list that is part of the help file available within the package.... read more

Michael Ziege und Joël Fisler are offering a 11 hour course on eLML (eLearning Markup Language). The course takes place on November 10, 16 and 24 at the Irchel campus of University of Zurich. It will cover topics such as introductory eLML, creating lessons, converting to IMS CPs and SCORMs, plus integration in LMS platforms such as OLAT and WebCT.

The course is free for University members and signup is possible online at https://www.unizh.ch/cgi-bin/ssl-dir/kurseWS0607#13 ... read more

Today a minor stable update of eLML was released. The update contains mainly bugfixes and documentation updates. This stable release also fixes a bug where XMLSpy would not do the XSLT transformation of a lesson due to a metadata error. Please refer to the release notes for a listing of fixed bugs.

eLML 3.0 has been around for some weeks now but we decided to wait for version 3.01 (including some bugfixes, updated man-pages etc.) until we informed via website and newsletter about the update. So what's new with eLML 3? The four main points are:
1. Everything got easier in eLML 3 :-)
2. Full support for CSS
3. We introduced an "elml" namespace
4. The website http://www.elml.ch has totally been updated... read more

Joël Fisler will present a paper about eLML - written with Co-author Susanne Bleisch - at the International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technology WEBIST. The conference will take place in Setubal/Portugal on April 11th to 13th. The paper will be available for download on the eLML website as soon as it published. For more information have a lookt at http://webist.org/

Since today eLML version 2.50 stable is available for download on the eLML website. The big step from 2.02 to 2.50 is caused by a new folder structure used in eLML. Now there is a clear separation between the core code used by all projects and the project specific code. Further improvements are the support for both SCORM and IMS CP, valid XHTML 1.0 code code generated, bugfixes in both the online and the print version etc. Please read the file release notes and changes for more information.

eLML introduced today a distinction between a stable and a developer release. Furthermore both releases are available in an updated version. The difference between these versions are:
- Stable release: Available on Sourceforge as ZIP package download (contains all files)
- Developer release: Available on Sourceforge via CVS (contains ONLY "core" files)

The stable release 2.02 has been released yesterday and contains all the latest bugfixes as described in the read me file. It is the LAST version using the old folder structure.... read more

Yesterday developers of the MELS (Multimedia & e-Learning Center) and eLML developers from Zurich and Basel held a first eLML meeting. Nearly all persons developing with eLML were present and therefore some "major" decisions were made. You fill find the full minutes attached below (only available in German). Some major points:
- There will be a new folder structure
- eLML will become be more customizable
- The use of CSS will be enforced
- CVS version of eLML is now called "developer release", ZIP version is the "stable release"... read more

There was an incompatibility between the eLML XSL files and the latest XMLSpy version 2006. This problem has been fixed on the CVS version, a binary version will follow in the next days.