Working in the H5P Kitchen means constant experimentation, even in the operation of the kitchen itself.
We are adding a new component to add to the webinar series of invited guest experts (this is the last Thursday of each month). On the second Thursday of each month, Clint Lalonde and I will run open kitchen sessions as drop-in sessions. Project grantees will be invited to join us Thursday, March 9 at 9:00am PT (check for your local time).
The idea is to be available for specific questions about H5P, Pressbooks, designing effective practice problems… whatever questions you may come with. We also are hoping our project participants will come for feedback on the elements they are working on.
As their projects are starting out, we would hope to talk about getting ideas for what H5P can do (e.g. scouting for examples) and sorting through the many kinds of utensils available on the H5P drawer.
Our session include few announcement type messages (we opted to put at the end since the questions and discussions were so good, and a launching of a new Peak Chef Challenge. That is the portion we will record (nothing from the drop in parts are recorded). The whole idea is to provide more direct help to first our grantees.
The first challenge is now open
If no one shows up? We might shed a tear, but will plan to record a demo or something of relevance.
At least this first session or two will be limited to project grantees (check with us in Mattermost if you need the access details) but hopefully we will open this up to anyone who wants to drop in the kitchen.
The kitchen now has open hours to drop in and chat, ask, share about using H5P in Pressbooks. Drop in on us!
Key Points
Just some notes of topics that came up during the session.
- A reminder for those new to the tools that H5P content is created in it’s own area of the Pressbooks (aka WordPress) interface, in its own kind of media “library”. These items are inserted into your Pressbooks content while editing any chapter via “shortcode” references. This does mean that any updates to the original H5P content are reflected wherever they appear in your textbook. See also the Pressbooks guide for using H5P as well as our own getting Started With H5P resources).
- We had a great discussion and overview of editing metadata in your H5P content. Note there are two levels of metadata- the overall information for the entire activity (where you get credit and designate the license it ought to be shared under) as well as the reuse information (licenses, sources) for any media you include. These are combined, when published, when you click the Rights of Use button. Look for more explanation of metadata in our post Meet Up With Metadata or see how both kinds appear in this small, silly example:
- The License Choosing for media can be challenging. We had great questions about which options to use for content from Unsplash and Pixabay, which are sources of images you can definitely use. However, H5P offers no license options that match these sources. And even more gray area we tried to sort out was media from Canva. Look soon for a new resource (link will come here) where we will try and outline the recommendations for using media from sites where the licenses may not show up in H5P. I tried to make a case in the H5P forums for better license options, but it does not look like it will change.
See our first attempt to provide a guide for setting media metadata in H5P. It is an evolving document.
As I tried to suggest in Mattermost, getting the metadata “right” is easier if you use content that has an explicit Creative Commons license:
As a strategy I recommend aiming first for using sites/collections where reuse us explicitly clear with an established Creative Commons license. Your best place to look is the Creative Commons search that covers flickr, Wikimedia Commons, and many museum collections.
You are also on good ground with mega collections like Pixabay, Pexels, Unsplash. We will work on identifying an appropriate license selection for these in H5P as their licenses are not listed.
When you get into these other ones like Canva, Abobe you are likely going to be in greyer territory. We are not in a position to be arbitrary cops, this is going to fall on you to choose. You will always be on better grounds if there is some attempt to attribute than none.
If you are trying to use a piece of media which does not have an explicit Creative Commons license, feel free to ask the community in Mattermost. We can together sort out how to use in H5P and/or suggest perhaps an alternative media item that can achieve the same goal but also with an explicit license.
Also, our own Josie Gray shared a collection of suggested media sources for projects like yours, see https://opentextbc.ca/oerdiscipline/chapter/multimedia-collections/
Featured Image: Pixabay Image by StockSnap modified by Alan Levine to include the H5P/PB logo and a Walk-ins Welcome lettering created in PhotoShop.
