H5P and the Interactive Content Revolution

Important: Translated automatically from Spanish by 🌐💬 Aphra 1.0.0

I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but when I set out to create educational material for my classes, I’m quite demanding about the format¹. We both know the work it takes to prepare new material, so the last thing I want is to create it on a platform that might become obsolete at some point. I also want it to be versatile² and allow me to customize it as much as possible. A big plus would be if it provides the most information possible about the student’s interaction with the material, but on the same platform I usually use for classroom management, otherwise transferring the information and student registration would take up too much of my precious time. Oh, and it should be free of course… Is that too much to ask?

The H5P toolkit³ comes to the rescue. I’m not going to list its features because you can deduce them from the requirements mentioned and because they’re already on their official page. Instead, I’m going to name some types of content you can create with suggestions for use:

• Course Presentation: Take your slides and notes a step further by making them interactive with questions that help your students get feedback on what they’re learning (and help you in turn to know if they’re reading and understanding it).

• Interactive Video: If you’re familiar with the Edpuzzle⁴ platform, this allows you to do something similar, but without taking student data to an external platform. You can add different types of questions to explanatory videos, even make the student go back in playback if they don’t know the answer. I know it’s difficult to maintain attention with a video these days, but it can be very useful for explaining complex concepts that they have to review several times.

• Documentation Tool: With the rise of various learning approaches like problem-based, project-based, and challenge-based learning⁵, you can use this tool to structure the documentation they should produce, helping to mark the steps for students not used to this kind of thing.

• Choose Your Own Adventure (literal translation)⁶: One of the new ones. Remember the “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels? Well, it’s the same, but with interactive content. You can create different learning paths, depending on each person’s prior knowledge. An idea I really like is to use it as a simulation game, for them to learn to make correct decisions in situations they might encounter in real life.

Thanks to the fact that the content can be embedded as HTML5, there’s a use case that I usually find quite useful. Remember those mini-games in flash as ads on web pages that called you to click? In Moodle⁷ courses, I occasionally embed an activity that reinforces basic content, such as the comparison of layers between the OSI model and TCP/IP⁸. This acts as a sort of ‘brain hack’ for less productive students, those who wander through the course without getting to work, and who unwittingly start doing the activity. Can psychology be used to “force” learning?

Two questions to wrap up:

• Why not propose to students to invent their own activities? Sometimes I’ve asked each working group to create an activity (for example flashcards) with several questions. Then they can try to solve them and look for errors in those of other groups.
• If you like it, why not collaborate with the initiative? If you have programming knowledge, you can modify existing content types or create new ones. If you don’t, you can also translate content types into other languages or simply spread it to the world.

The truth is that, despite its advantages, it’s not as popular as other tools that are repeated over and over in the blogosphere⁹ and on social networks. Perhaps, because it can be used freely. Perhaps, because there are no programs to become a Certified Teacher¹⁰. Or maybe it’s something else.

Stay safe and keep your cool¹¹.