Into the Kitchen: Cooking and Spicing Up OERs with H5P

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This self paced workshop can be completed at your own pace. They were created first for a hands-on online workshop for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s Digital Learning Summit on July 12, 2022. This follows up on a tasting “branching” tour of H5P and is an updated version of a previous 2021 Arizona OER Conference workshop.

About the Workshop

If the opening session made you hungry for more, we venture next into a direct experience remixing, editing, creating your own H5P content. Often these types of sessions expose you to the overwhelming array of content types — just grabbing a random tool from the kitchen drawer is no way to learn to cook. Like the cooking guide Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, perhaps there are basic elements of H5P cooking.

So we will start first with taking one of those samples from the tasting tour or one you can find from the shelf, then opening it up in the H5P authoring platform to modify and understand how it was made. Yes, remix is in the mix.

We will provide some suggestions for places you can publish and share what you made. Finally, with some first experiences in the H5P Kitchen, you ought to have everything you need to start creating your own dishes from scratch.

All of the activities here will be highly participatory, ideally fun, and all of the materials will be available so you can come back and cook at your own pace.

Kitchen Gadgets for Workshop Participants

One of the virtues of H5P is that the creation tools are platform independent and that the content produce is easily transportable. To experience this, our first activities will make use of an H5P editor that works on any desktop or laptop computer. You will sample the H5P remix/reuse capabilities by importing existing content, modifying it, and then exporting a newer version. Download and install Lumi from https://lumi.education/

Publishing and sharing your H5P content in a way you can incorporate it into your learning content does require access to an online platform, and you are welcome to use any you might already have access to. For this workshop, one option to both create and share H5P is a new open source project, Learnful’s OER Studio. We have arranged access to a demo version at https://oerstudio-demo.learnful.app/ (a registration code will be provided during the workshop).

But since H5P is flexible, you can also make use of these other kitchen gadgets you might have access to:

  1. Our current recommendation for participants new to H5P is to use the downloadable version of Lumi or its new cloud based H5P editor.
  2. You can also create an account by visiting http://h5p.org/ and click Create New Account. These accounts are for practice only and you have access to fewer H5P tools, but it’s a low threshold way to start practicing.
  3. If you have access to a self-hosted WordPress site, create or use an existing site, and install the H5P WordPress plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/h5p/– it has everything you need to create content and from there can be embedded in any other site.
  4. If you have access to a Pressbooks instance where you can create content, then H5P should be built in (look for it as an option on your dashboard when logged into a book you can edit).
  5. If your LMS is enabled for H5P (check with your technical support) you can use that as a space to create H5P.

With any of theses gadgets in place in your own kitchen, you are that much closer to cooking with H5P.

Let’s Get Cooking

Your Kitchen Guide

Alan Levine explores the potential of new technologies for education. In 1993 he plugged a Mac SE/30 running a web server into the Maricopa Community Colleges network and has not left the web since. After 14 years at Maricopa he brought innovative ideas to his work with the New Media Consortium and the University of Mary Washington, and 10 years as independent consultant (see http://cog.dog). His current role is a director of member strategy and community engagement for Open Education Global. An early proponent of blogs and RSS, since 2003 Alan has shared his ideas and discoveries at CogDogBlog.com. He works from home in rural Saskatchewan where his current interests include digital storytelling, photography, bending WordPress to his whims, and randomly dipping into and sharing from the infinite river of the internet. He also tinkers in a real kitchen.

Featured Image: Unsplash photo by Michael Browning modified by Alan Levine to include the H5P logo.