March Webinar: Learning from Team Vital Signs

Our first Cooking with H5P and Pressbooks webinar of the new season is Thursday, March 25 at 9:00 am PT (check for your local time).

The recording of this show is now available. We have curated links and questions from the lively chat session (see below).

About this Show

We are excited to bring to you members of the team from the first round of these BCcampus H5P OER Development grants that added over 120 activities to create the 2nd Canadian Edition of Vital Sign Measurements Across the Lifespan, now available in the BCcampus Open Textbook Library.

Joining us for this show are 2nd Edition contributors Kymberley Bontinen, Lee-Anne Stephen, Michelle Hughes, and Margaret Verkuyl. We look forward to hearing them describe their strategy, methodology, and lessons learned from their work on this H5P infused textbook.

Links Mentioned in Chat

Margaret also referred to two papers on using the concept of suspension of disbelief in designing branching scenarios:

  • Exploring Suspension of Disbelief During Simulation-Based Learning” by Virginia C. Muckler in Clinical Simulation in Nursing, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2017
    “Rooted in aviation and used consistently in the training and preparation of health care professionals for decades, simulation is an innovative teaching strategy that facilitates experiential learning in a safe learning environment. Effective simulation hinges on the ability of the learner to suspend disbelief. Participants must accept the otherwise unrealistic aspects of clinical simulation, and yet the concept of suspension of disbelief has not been fully explored in the field of nursing. What allows some simulation participants to fully believe or immerse themselves in simulation while others struggle to ā€œpretendā€? What are the determinants of a participants’ ability to suspend disbelief during simulation-based learning activities? Factors that contribute to the learner’s ability to suspend disbelief include fidelity, psychological safety, emotional buy-in, the fiction contract, and how learners assign meaning. Various other factors that enable or impede one’s ability to immerse in simulation are considered yet need further exploration.”
  • Designing Virtual Gaming Simulations” by Margaret Verkuyl, Jennifer L. Lapum, Oona St-Amant, Michelle Hughes, Daria Romaniuk, Paula Mastrilli in Clinical Simulation in Nursing Volume 32, 2019, Pages 8-12,
    “Experiential learning is an important component of nursing education. Coupled with the limited opportunities to practice clinical skills in specialty areas and the pedagogical possibilities of virtual environments, our team started producing virtual gaming simulations. They incorporate an innovative pedagogical approach to simulation based on a branching scenario format. In this article, we share our experience in creating virtual gaming simulations with the aim to inspire other educators to engage in this technology-enabled, learning modality designed to enhance experiential learning among nursing students.”

Questions, Answers From Chat

  • Speaking of costs, I’d be very interested if anyone has stats on average textbook costs at your institution or in your province
  • Anyone played with branching scenarios? The social work example really provides a deep learning experience.
  • Students are creating videos, so I’d love tips!
  • Where do you store the actual videos when you create the interactive video activities? E.g., do you link to YouTube, or use a specific server?
    • We have a Kaltura video server at BCcampus where we host videos that are part of this project. It’s a bit of a workaround to get the videos working with Kaltura, but see post about how to do that on the Kitchen site
    • H5P works easiest with YouTube. We had interest in other options especially to avoid their recommended videos at the end. You can use mp4 links directly
    • We tried using Kaltura at the Canada School of Public Service. Had some technical issues, unfortunately.
    • Kaltura works great, just needs some effort to get direct links to video that H5P wants.
    • Our video server used to allow for “direct links” (e.g., linking to the .mp4 video directly), but not anymore, so we are not using the interactive video H5P for the time being.
    • Wonder if video servers have been discussed in the Rebus Community…
  • Do we have the same issue that the content has to be hosted on a Canadian server for privacy reasons? Comes up a lot in my online courses ā€¦
    • It depends on what the content is. If it contains personal identifiable information, that is where you have to tread lightly with where that data is hosted. Every institution is a bit different in how they deal with it so I would suggest if you have a question, go with the advice from your institution.
    • BC Campus hosts an instance of H5P within Pressbooks. When you author something in Pressbooks, it is housed with BC Campus (safe within FIPPA) but listed in the wider Pressbooks directory
    • But H5P content can be downloaded as a file and then embedded into a website or LMS
    • One issue with some uses of videos as OER is that we lack the source material.
  • Did you use a word template to storyboard your H5P prior to entering the information? Or did you work directly in H5P to storyboard?
    • We just developed our own on a Google Drive so we could add the feedback before uploading
  • Is there a story board template for all of the options for H5P that exists that we can populate? Or do we need to develop those on our own?
  • Does H5P support 3D content?
    • I donā€™t think there are H5P content types that use 3D.
    • Possible someone working on it? Thatā€™s something to ask in the H5P community forums https://h5p.org/forum
    • Some former colleagues at colabnumerique.com are doing a lot of work on XR (Extended Reality). Support for this kind of thing could make a huge difference in the not-so-distant future.
  • Any accessibility considerations on these tools (e.g., the image juxtaposition)?
    • Testing H5P for WCAG 2.1 might be a challenge.
    • Generally good support in H5P for accessibility, but not for image juxtaposition
    • One might with Image Juxtaposition create an appendix entry to link to that can have explanations of the two images. A challenge to do but possible. When the tools do not provide, we should be able to craft an end around
  • Which program is the course housed in?
  • Is there a yearly membership to join pressbooks
    • there are numerous Pressbooks options. At BCcampus, we have set up our own server as a provincial shared service using the open source Pressbooks plugin for WordPress. But many institutions choose to pay a support fee to Pressbooks to set up an institutional instance through Pressbooks EDU https://pressbooks.com/educational-institutions/
  • Do I or why do I need to integrate H5P into our Blackboard LMS?
    • adding to BB would give you the ability to create H5P within BB. As well, there are reporting options when you integrate H5P into BB and you can hook H5P activities into the gradebook to create assessable activities
    • Embedding H5P content should work everywhere. Some LMS support is deeper on the creation side (Moodle has a content library since 3.9).
    • H5P is now part of core Moodle for those institutions who use Moodle
  • A nifty trick for Pressbooks -just tack on /h5p-listing to any book to see all H5P inside, e.g. https://opentextbc.ca/vitalsignmeasurement/h5p-listing/
  • Are there some examples of the ā€œbehind the scenesā€ so we can see the progression from a creator point of view? Or maybe this is what Michelle is talking about nowā€¦
  • Is there a space (say, on GitHub or GitLab) with people crowdsourcing some H5P activities?
    • This is not crowdsourcing, but eCampusOntario has an H5P Studio with lots of content that you can build on –
    • True. Was thinking more about forking.
  • Audio is so important, any resources out there with tips on mics to use for at home audio recording?
    • On microphones on people, it reminds me of a classic in ethnographic film with microphones on sheep
    • Audio is so important. In mau ways more important than video.
    • And with Zoom we are all learning the importance of good lighting
    • One of my struggles is living on a busy street, so have to do my recordings at midnight when it is quiet
    • Glad that audio is discussed here! So much visuocentric material out there!
  • If the textbook isn’t static, is it still a textbook? šŸ˜‰

Learn More About Vital Signs Measurement Across the Lifespan

See also a summary and some examples from Vital Signs Measurement from our review:

It might be worth comparing this new version to the the first edition by Jennifer L. Lapum, Margaret Verkuyl, Wendy Garcia, Oona St-Amant, and Andy Tan published in 2008 by Ryerson University to see how much the practice problems and knowledge tests add to the textbook.

To whet your appetite for this show:

We have a few suggestions for you.

  1. See the new textbook! Explore the Vital Sign Measurement Across the Lifespan directly from BCcampus Open Textbook collection.
  2. See the H5P Catalog. View a listing of all H5P content in the Vital Signs textbook. This link leads to a single listing of all 136 H5P activities created by this team
  3. View by chapters with H5P. Doing a search on ā€œH5Pā€ will provide links to all chapters in the Vital Signs textbook that contain at least one interactive activity. This is how you can explore the H5P activities in context.

This webinar is open to educators everywhere interested in using H5P in Pressbooks.

This event is free and open. To ensure we have an inclusive and welcoming environment for all, weā€™ve added registration to our webinars. Please note that it will close two hours before the event.

This notice is to inform you that this session will be recorded, archived, and made available publicly on BCcampus.ca. By participating in this session, you acknowledge that your participation in this session will be recorded and the recording will be made available openly.


Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons photo by George Garrigues shared under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license.


Featured Image: Collage of cover of Vital Sign Measurements Across the Lifespan 2nd Canadian edition and two H5P activities licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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