I’m test-driving H5P – an open HTML5 content creator that promises many things! And for the most part, it delivers. I tried out a few of the 20 plus content types that they have available here. I’ll continue to add to this as time goes on. Since it’s currently October, there is a pumpkin-spice flavoured theme to these examples (love it or hate it!).

Multiple Choice
This is the first H5P content type that I tried. Simple, straightforward – can give feedback for each incorrect and correct attempt. I score this a 5/5 on usability.

Course Presentation
A bit more complex and I wish you could upload an existing PPT, but as far as I can tell, you have to create the slides from scratch. Super easy to use and there are lots of ways to add interactive questions. I can see this being the most-used content creation type. 4/5 just due to the non-PPT upload feature.

Find the Hotspot
At first I was confused and tried this as a drag and drop, which wasn’t very straightforward. But then something clicked and I created the hotspot image. I wish there was a way to have multiple questions for one image (e.g., find this, then find this) but it looks like you have to recreate this question if you want to do that. Since cloning is an option it’s not a super big deal. I can see this being a useful content type for simple anatomy lessons. 4/5

 

Interactive Video
This was one content type that I thought would be the most useful. Right or wrong, online courses rely a lot on video – so this is a way to break it up with questions and ‘interactions’. I tried out multiple choice, fill in the blank, T/F and crossroads – which enables viewers to respond and be pushed to certain areas of the video (good for refreshing content!). Other interactions that I didn’t try include drag and drop, mark the words and interact hot spot. The feedback mechanisms for these wasn’t super consistent, which is a bit of a flaw. All in all a solid 4.5/5 – although make sure the video is your own or is licensed accordingly!

 

Documentation Tool
This is also a content type that shows a lot of promise. It’s one of the more complex ones, but would allow the viewer to go through a structured documentation process that can then be exported as a pdf. I can see this having tremendous value with a project metadata document, a goal-driven writing assignment (much like the example below, from H5P) or a series of reflective questions and prompts. I give this a 4/5 just because it is a bit more complex to create (which is why I used the example instead of creating my own!)

Also, H5P is committed to making their content types fully accessible, but you should check what each interactive’s current accessibility status is prior to using for your learners.

UPDATE!

Back at it – several months later – continuing to test drive a few more of the remaining H5P interactives.  The theme this time is….cacti! It is my hometown of Dundas, Ontario’s 43^rd annual Cactus Festival this coming weekend, so the prickly succulent is in the spotlight. There is a parade, carnival rides, vendors, live music, yummy food and, funnily enough, very few cacti. You have to timetravel back a couple of decades to when fourteen of Ben Veldhuis’ greenhouses cultivated cacti on the edge of the eastern part of town, marking Dundas as the global cactus leader. Now all you can get is some good ol’ cactus juice at the local watering holes.

Let’s play around with this theme and H5P:

Fill in the Blanks

Pretty straightforward interactive directing users to fill in the blank(s) with the correct words, which are delineated with astersisks. A neat feature is that it auto-corrects mis-spelled words and if you insert a forward slash in between two options, either can be typed (e.g., the word six and the number 6 is presented as *6/six*

Essay Tool

An okay interactive where a score is calculated based on the presence of identified keywords. Obviously very subjective based on the list of keywords that the creator includes. You can include common variations of words (e.g., car, vehicle, automobile). I could see where this would be made more valuable by say including variations plus a total number of keywords that exceeds the number needed for a perfect score. So, if you get 10 out of 12 possible words, you would still receive 100%.

Image Slider

Flashcards

Image Sequencing