Desert Cooking Workshop: Spicing Up OERs With H5P

There was a sequel to sharing the H5P/PB Kitchen as a keynote February 19 for the Arizona OER Conference. A week later, I brought to the same conference a hands on 90 minute workshop, all of it hosted right here.

This workshop was designed to be stand-alone, so anyone can make use of the materials as a way to explore creating and remixing H5P content. In addition to experimenting with the Kitchen Gadgets, I hoped as well to stress the portability of H5P content (moving it from platform to platform), as well as how the authoring difference is the same using an online editor and the special desktop H5P editor from Lumi.

The workshop include three main sections (and we actually barely scratched the third).

  1. You Don’t Start Cooking By Reaching into the Utensil Drawer. Knowing where / how to find H5P content to get ideas from, or to remix. The premise here is that when you decide to learn to cook something, is the first thing that you do is grab a tool? This was an exercise built on a previous post here about Scouting for H5P Examples introducing participants to the eCampusOntario H5P Studio and the Pressbooks Directory as ways to find content of interest, download the source H5P for later cooking. Workshop participants shared what they found and you can see their results.
  2. Remixing from H5P Hors d’oeuvres. The first activity focused on learning H5P by importing a .h5p content file (either something they found in part 1 or a sample from our serving tray) into an online editor, such as the free accounts available at H5P.org. I thought it better to start with existing content than try and make it from scratch.
  3. Simmering More Complex H5P Dishes (we never got this far) was pretty much the same approach, but using some of the more complex H5P content types, the ones that can combine smaller singe interactions into a larger whole (e.g. Question Sets, Interactive Video, Course Presentation, Interactive Book).

I have to say it was challenging to know what was going on as individuals were doing independent work and all I could see in WebEx was grey squares and names.

An archive is available:

But they all stayed and sent questions in chat or video voice. From what I could see, this audience was completely new to H5P.

I hope that this workshop stays in the cabinet in the H5P Kitchen as a resource for people new to H5P or looking to try it out.

Thanks again to the organizers of the Arizona OER Conference for inviting me and the messy kitchen into the conference.


Featured Image: Curvy Armed Saguaro flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) edited to insert a version of the H5P and Pressbooks logo into the desert sky.

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