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Using Silverlight/Expression Blend for eLearning Development

Abhijit Kadle  |  June 15, 2009  |  eLearning Development, Innovation, Learning Design, Learning Technology

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Using Silverlight / Expression Blend for eLearning Development Elearning development tools: only Adobe?
Over the last ten years or so, major elearning developers have preferred to use tools like Flash, Authorware and Director from Adobe (earlier Macromedia). The reason was simple– it was an easier way to achieve the multimedia integration needed to deliver engaging content over variety of media (standalone CD based and then transitioning to web based).

In recent years, with the inclusion of various features in Flash and the vast installation base of Flash Player amongst internet users, Flash has become be first choice for eLearning development and delivery over web. With the growing popularity of Flash for elearning, many elearning vendors developed their Rapid authoring tools which were aimed to publish Flash based elearning content without requiring major programming. One of the other major advantages of Flash is that is supports close designer-developer collaboration. It blurred the boundaries between the design and development of eLearning content.

Is there a competitor to Flash?
Is there an alternative to Flash? Perhaps not better than Flash, but at least its equal? Till the release of Silverlight 1.1, realistically there was no competitor to Flash. However, the release of Silverlight 2.0 last year changed that. Silverlight is positioning itself as a major competitor to Flash, especially from the RIA development perspective because of its functional aspects. However, we haven’t heard much about elearning development using Silverlight.

Given the architecture of Silverlight, it does seem more structured to produce feature rich RIAs rather than eLearning content. We considered what features are required to produce engaging eLearning content, areas where we see Silverlight is lacking. We’ve been playing with Silverlight to understand its power and limitations relevant to eLearning.

Using Silverlight/Expression Blend

Installation
Our experience started with the installation of Silverlight and associated tools. Before one can start developing Silverlight applications, you need to install a whole bunch of software and tools – the SilverLight runtime, Visual Studio, Silverlight tools, Blend and various service packs. An average eLearning developer will find the installation a daunting process. Post installation, configuration and getting it all to work seamlessly is another task altogether.

Expression Blend
Elearning content more focuses on presentation and experience rather than functionality. Hence for from that perspective, perhaps the MS Expression suite is more important than Silverlight itself and its underlying .NET framework features. The Expression Blend provides features to create and edit XAML files which in turn rendered by the Silverlight runtime. Expression also provides familiar drawing and editing tool similar to that of other graphics creation tool.
If Silverlight is used alone within the Visual Studio IDE, it’s cumbersome to create and edit graphics and layouts. Creating animation is also quite complicated as one has to code time slots and animation effects parameters manually into the XAML file. This implies the use of tool separate tools, always – one to create and edit graphical content and another to write the program logic which manipulates the graphics and environment.

Designer/ developer collaboration
In eLearning content development, the skill sets required by a graphic designer and a programmer are very different. The architecture of Silverlight and Blend is such that the process of graphics creation and associated programming overlaps closely. Using file sharing and versioning tools to get various people to work together on a single project will be quite complex using the Silverlight/Blend combination.
While creating any eLearning content, there is a mix of people with different skill sets working on same project. The tendency is to adopt a methodology where there is minimal dependency on each other while developing elearning content.

Audio / Video synching
Another aspect is the use of audio / video in the content. While there is quite a buzz on the high quality audio / video presented through Silverlight, it lacks an essential aspect i.e. synching audio with the animating graphical content on stage. Although, it is supported in Silverlight Windows Application (WPF application which is standalone), there is no direct method to sync audio with onscreen content for web-application. As of now, majority of eLearning content is delivered through the web and all audio driven courses require audio to be in sync with the onscreen content (graphics / text animation).

Shell / Content player
The elearning course is generally presented with the help of some kind of shell or content player which lets the learner navigate learning modules using simple user interfaces. Creating such a content player may be tough job using Silverlight (relative to Flash).

Standard compliance and course delivery
ELearning content is typically hosted and delivered through various Learning Management Systems. To be able to host the courses hosted on the LMS, the elearning content should comply with standards guidelines published by SCORM, AICC or custom compliance conventions which the LMS in question supports.
While, implementation of these guidelines in the Silverlight architecture is possible, it not going to be as easy as ensuring compliance using Flash and JavaScript.

Reaching the Intended Audience
ELearning courses are meant for specific groups of learners – the audience. These groups could consist of children, adults, individuals living in specific territory, or those who understand a specific language, employees of a certain company. Course developers would like to ensure that the courses they develop reach their intended audiences.

As compared to Flash, which has about 85% install base, Silverlight runtime penetration is about 25%+ on PCs as depicted by Scott Guthrie in this article. Apart from installation of development environment, there are some goof ups in runtime installations too which need to be addressed while targeting the intended version. The article here depicts the problems that would be faced and the associated tweaks if you are targeting for SL3 beta. The runtime installable size too is quite bigger than its Flash counterpart. This article has the comparison figures.

The Silverlight runtime is not yet available on Linux and the Mac version has some issues. The open source implementation – Moonlight for Linux – is still in development. A preview version of Moonlight was released some time ago.

Silverlight is not yet available on mobile and handheld devices. This means learning content can’t yet be delivered to mobile devices. This is a snafu as more and more learning content will be accessed on mobile devices.

So, should you be developing elearning using Silverlight / Blend?

As we’ve discussed, eLearning solutions emphasize user experience more than features and functionality. We rarely need the superb data binding features provided by Silverlight or rich feature set of the Visual Studio IDE.

As eLearning developers, these are things we need before we consider using Silverlight:
• The development environment should be simple, easy to install and configure
• It should support efficient team collaboration – in light of the graphic designer programmer divide.
• Implementation / development time should be reduced as the low shelf-life elearning content may get outdated given our experience with the time it takes to develop applications using Silverlight.
• As the majority of eLearning content is audio driven, there should be efficient way to sync audio with onscreen content
• The architecture must support the ability to develop scalable, feature rich and efficient content players (shells) which can be re-used to deliver content modules

No product is perfect, we’ve seen that Adobe Flash has its own drawbacks; ones that have persisted from its earliest versions. However, due to its dominant nature in past few years, a world-wide developer community was able to overcome those problems with tweaks and techniques. The majority of eLearning developers use Adobe products and have a HTML-JavaScript development background; for these individuals there is a considerably steeper learning curve to move to the Silverlight development environment.

Silverlight has a long way to go to beat Adobe Flash in eLearning content development. While the new Silverlight marks a major improvement and gives companies and developers new reasons to give it a try, it still lacks the basics required for eLearning content development. Silverlight’s universal acceptance and adoption rate is not satisfactory yet. There is mounting evidence that major organizations like the NY Times, and the MLB has dropped Silverlight in favor of Adobe products.

Microsoft has a very deep base for building good functional solutions; with Silverlight, they are slowly moving to building experience-based solutions. We’ll be watching closely to see if Silverlight and its accompanying toolset will give us what we need to develop eLearning content.

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Comments ( 11 comments )

  1. Mark June 15, 2009 at 11:07 pm

    Well-written article and a great topic. It would take many years for Microsoft to evolve Silverlight to something that would be of value to the Elearning community. Not because they can’t (they surely could), but because the market isn’t there for them to do it. Their goal is to capture the straight RIA market back from the developers who have moved to the Flex framework.

    I’d love for there to be a legit competitor to Flash, but there isn’t. The closest thing to competition is HTML 5, but that will still require Flash for true interactions.

  2. tdurant July 14, 2009 at 6:06 pm

    I am just starting to use expression blend and silverlight and I agree it has a long way to go.  But Recently I learned that you can make some animation logic in blend that is faster and easier then in flash.  The example I was taught was in a small baseball animation. We could use buttons to throw from home plate to any of the bases which is only two key frames per base.  But by simply deleting the first keyframe we can throw to any base from any base in any order.  Think about that.  By deleting a frame we add logic and functionality.  And did I mention I did not have to code a single line.

    If blend and silverlight stay on this track I may have to set aside the adobe products so I can more time designing courses and games and less time coding.

  3. Shaun Kiesewetter November 9, 2009 at 9:11 am

    Installation:
    Expression Blend 3 1 installation, and you done.

    Designer / Developer collaboration would only be difficult if you were doing it wrong. Our UI is in a completely different project to the logic, and is glued with MVVM, using the powerful command framework.

    Shell/Content Player
    Could not disagree with you more, flash has a dynamically typed language called AS3 , SL uses statically strongly typed modern languages such as C#, how can you suggest this would be difficult to do?

    Audio video sync
    Thats news to me :-). Funny mines working just dandy.

    Standard compliance
    This takes the cake the SCORM specification divorces itself from tec domain through its manifests (Thats the whole point of SCORM). Exactly what are you talking about? The specification is about a description of the content for an LMS, and states rules such as no server side intelligence as this is domain specific. All of our  content  at this stage is completely proprietary.

    Why go flash?
    Simple Adoption, adoption adoption. But please let’s understand this correctly, SL is a GREAT tool it will just take the world some time to get there. Watch AZURE, that combined with SL, is your ultimate delivery platform.

  4. Mohamed Omar January 18, 2010 at 11:28 am

    Hi, really neat article, but I need to know what are the strength points that make flash the no. 1 elearning dev. tool
    and Please What about silverlight 4.0 which is in beta now and for what extend it can serve the elearning dev.

    Thanks

  5. Scott Guthrie March 16, 2010 at 1:30 am

    The very fact that the writer of this blog uses “may be” at so many places shows that he is just beating around the bush without valid evidence. Silverlight rocks bigtime.

  6. Abhijit Kadle March 17, 2010 at 8:47 am

    To us its really very simple. To render the type of content we typically use as eLearning courseware – Silverlight is just overkill.
    I’d really love three examples of courseware that are created using Silverlight; sadly there arent any. As an industry, we are geared towards using Flash, and that’s how its going to stay for a while yet.
    I dont beat on Silverlight;  I appreciate that it has its uses and capabilities that can be leveraged to build quality web applications/services. If I were developing a game, I’d definitely consider Silverlight to serve some purpose.

  7. Mike June 12, 2010 at 10:02 pm

    Abhijit,
    If you are “geared toward flash” then why bother writing a review?  This is 2010 and you are still hacking at Silverlight despite it going through two more major upgrades since your review.    I find expression blend much easier to work with than flash pro.   I can do limited programmatic options without touching ANY code. Incidentally it  is now closing in on 70 percent penetration.

  8. Abhijit Kadle June 14, 2010 at 9:07 am

    I wrote this almost a year ago, and it still draws comments.
    Even a year later, the eLearning sea is Flash, parts of it are changing, but not towards Silverlight, but HTML5 instead.
    The web is going mobile, and Silverlight isnt on the iPhone or Android OS. Flash 10.1 perhaps will be the first to move to Android 2.2.
    Where will Silverlight fit in all this? 

  9. Mohamed Omar June 14, 2010 at 11:34 am

    I have a small question regarding the Mobile space
    Where is the Android ?
    The most widespread phone OS is iPhone
    and nearly the Windows Phone with the 7 series release will do a good job also and Silverlight is in the core of WP7

  10. Greg Johnson June 13, 2011 at 11:54 pm

    I found this series of comments interesting, especially about the web going mobile. The web may be going to iPhomes and Android smart phones but e-learning would most likely stay with laptops and tablets. There just isn’t enough space on an iPhone screen. Of course that won’t stop anyone from producing terrible e-learning that runs that way. The original article dealt with silverlight for e-learning. I think with Sivlerlight 4 we are getting a lot closer. The biggest proplem I say was that no one has mentioned Scorm compliance so that the e-learning can be tracked by a learning management system. An “no” Silverlight on its own is not Scorm compliant, of course neither is Flash. I just finished my first e-learning course in Silverlight as an experiment and it looks every bit as good as its original in Flash and was no harder to develop. As most people did a few years ago with Flash, I had to develop a method of tracking. I actually found this easier to do with Silverlight as I am an experienced C#.net developer. I now have an assembly that can be reference by a a Silverlight e-learning project to make it Scorm compliant. I think Silverlights time will come before HTML5 is ready for e-learning development

  11. Nathan Weaver July 16, 2011 at 12:01 am

    It’s interesting playing catch up on the topic of using Silverlight for eLearning courses.  In the interest of latest developments, Silverlight 5, which is currently in beta and should be released by the end of the summer, appears to work on iPads.  You can also find Javascript examples for implementation into Silverlight, for the purpose of making things SCORM compliant.
    It will be interesting to see where things go for sure.  Though, I would agree, at this point, that if you are using a slides-synced-with-audio eLearning method then Silverlight probably isn’t your cup of tea.  At least, not for now.

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