June Webinar: In the Kitchen, Branching With Arley Cruthers

Our next Cooking with H5P and Pressbooks webinar was Thursday, June 24 at 9:00 am PT (check for your local time).

Joining us in the kitchen this month is Arley Cruthers, Applied Communications Instructor and Open Education Teaching Fellow at Kwantlan Polytechnic University. We hope to learn more about Arley’s creative ideas for teaching and communicating branching scenario style, and what it takes to (and why) build these  experiences in H5P. And maybe Arley will share how this ties into writing novels! Who knows where this show will branch.

The recording of this session is now available, enjoy!

Links Mentioned in Chat

Questions (some Answers) and Notes From Chat

  • Twine is an OpenSource option for visualizing branching narratives http://twinery.org/
    • Rich McCue (UVic) Twine Teaching lesson (CC licensed) https://goo.gl/bqz5Gk
    • I teach Twine to a large (~100 student) Pacific & Asian movie class, and their final group assignment this past semester was to create a Twine story to extend one of the movies that they studied in the class. This might be a good option given how relatively user friendly it is.
    • The H5P author interface for including multimedia looks much more user friendly than Twine.
  • I’m curious whether you created the Course Presentations (slides) separately and then combine in the Branching Scenario?
  • Do you give students students the option create Branching Scenarios as course assignments?
  • I want to use it to walk students through a few academic Integrity situations and their real world consequences.
  • I’ve done some work on this with pilots. In their case you deliberately create cognitive load to simulate decision-making in a cockpit.
  • I’m getting really inspired and I’m thinking I’d like to use it to have my French students travel through MontrĂ©al – they would have to use their language skills to choose where they want to go / order food / meet a new person. Can a documentation tool be used to collect the students choices at the end of the Branching Scenario?
    • Yes!
    • Maybe they could submit a video or audio file post adventure to describe their journey and choices?
    • would be awesome for Arley’s idea to start an activity/project using a branching scenario.
  • I’ve found one example in computer science/math as well where students are supposed to give a mathematical proof – and depending on what approach they choose, they may end up in a dead end – or eventually have proven a theorem.
  • From the library point of view, I could see a reference desk question scenario
  • The Nursing visit example on the H5P site which uses video is excellent as well.
  • On the topic of “choice” and thinking about making choosing easier, I’d love to recommend a short Ted Talk by Dr. Sheena Iyengar who researches Consumer Hyperchoice.
    • Part of her research shows that “conditioning for complexity” is more successful.
  • It’s more than a game – an actual learning experience, we can compare our experiences and discuss them further – yes.
  • In nursing, we host a debriefing session after the students play the game.
  • Love the connection between guided imagery and branched scenarios – interesting way to think of it
  • Maybe branching scenarios could give us first-world people get insight into the different choices that people may have in other parts of the world – could provide a lens into a different reality.
    • a branching scenario is not the exact same thing as a lived experience

Meet Arley Cruthers

Arley Cruthers is an Applied Communications instructor, writer, and former Paralympian. She got interested in H5P when creating interactive content for her OER textbook Business Writing For Everyone. During the pandemic, she started using H5P’s branching scenario tool to create “very boring Choose Your Own Adventures” that recreated pre-pandemic days that were boring at the time, but that she missed. This one is about a business trip. This led her to do a Choose Your Own Adventure keynote for BC Campus’ Studio 20 event. Currently, Arley is attempting to write a Choose Your Own Adventure memoir, and is thinking through how the branching format makes space for her neurodivergent storytelling style.

Because it is H5P we can share Arley’s Choose Your Own Adventure keynote here!

Registrant Interests

These were collected from the event registration as “hopes to take away”.

  1. A sense of the impact Arley’s experience with H5P had on her professional development.
  2. I’ve never heard of 5HP before!
  3. Tips about building and sharing branching scenarios; how to make them meaningful + fun!
  4. learn how to create branching scenarios
  5. To learn about branching scenarios and how they were used for communications. How difficult are they to create and lessons learned.
  6. Learn how to use H5P
  7. new ideas for design interactive learning objects using H5P
  8. More info about book publishing and h5p
  9. Learn how to use H5P branching scenarios
  10. I’m hoping to learn what branching is and how to do it.
  11. Ideas for how branching scenarios. Tips that will help me when I make mine.
  12. More about H5P, hopefully examples of how it’s being used for language learning
  13. More ideas on how to use H5P for health/tourism courses
  14. H5P ideas & inspiration
  15. A starting point using branching scenarios for a new OER underdevelopment using H5P
  16. Really interested to see how branching scenarios are applied and some examples of how they can be used.
  17. I’ve used and taught students in my multimedia and online learning course how to add multiple choice questions and labels to videos. I’m hoping to learn how to effectively use some of the other tools in the H5P toolkit.
  18. See 5HP in action
  19. How to use H5P in Pressbooks?
  20. An idea of the technical proficiency required to work with H5P – so I can communicate this with instructors.

This event is free and open. To ensure we have an inclusive and welcoming environment for all, we’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.

For more examples of H5P branching scenarios, and related resources, see our previous writeup “Branching Scenarios: Yes, No, Maybe?


Image Credit: Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay 

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