About the Kitchen

This site site supports awardees of the BCcampus 2020 H5P OER Development Grant program. As part of the Open Homework Systems Project, the grant program supports

post-secondary instructors and faculty in British Columbia to develop sets of content types in H5P that support open textbooks in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection… The intent of these grants is to develop activities in which students can practice applying new concepts and skills that align with content within the selected open textbook.

This project development is taking place from July through November, 2020.

H5P (an acronym for “HTML5 Package”) is an open-source content collaboration framework created to make it easy to create interactive, media-rich web content that works seamlessly in the most widely used platforms for creating educational content.

One of those key platforms is Pressbooks, the open-source content management system used for publishing the BC Campus collection of open textbooks.

Why a “Kitchen”?

Kitchens are a common feature of all homes and often are gathering spaces for conversations. The foods we prepare there are immersed in cultural and familial tradition. It does not matter if you warm frozen dishes in a microwave or create everything from scratch, it is still cooking.

While we have the formulas of recipes, there is no absolute best one out there. Cooking is also creative when we experiment and vary from recipes or just “wing it.” We rely on tools, gadgets, yet the act is very hands-on tactile. And while cooking can get messy, we can always clean it up afterward.

We see the work on these projects having many of these elements- we have appliances like our H5P and Pressbooks platforms as well as other media tools, we try different recipes/methods, and we also apply what we know from our own tradition of teaching. These kitchens are the places the activities being created to augment the experience learners have with open textbook content.

Learn more about the “elements” of cooking with H5P.

What’s in the H5P PB Kitchen?

Support for project participants include:

  • Mattermost Collaboration Space. hosted by the Open EdTech Collaborative, Mattermost, an environment similar to Slack/MS Teams, is the quickest way to not only ask questions of the project chefs, but also of other participants. Access initially will be limited to project participants, but we envision it becoming an open resource for other educators interested in the use of H5P in open textbooks.
  • Monthly Webinars. We will host a series of web meeting times to bring some external expertise to project participants, but also provide discussion and sharing among each other. This sessions will be open and also archive.
  • Cooking Notes. Look on this site for a regular series of published columns of tips and resources related to the project work.
  • Resource Guidebook. During the project all related resources will be collected and published in a BC Campus Open textbook on “Cooking with H5P”.

Who’s In the Kitchen?

See info on the projects being supported here.

Project Chefs

Intro to team.


Featured Image: Cooking Green Curry flickr photo by lejoe shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license