Cooking and Spicing Up OERs with H5P

OERizona

These materials were created for a hands-on online workshop delivered at the 2021 Arizona OER Conference on February 26, 2021. It follows up on a keynote presentation delivered a week earlier about the H5P/Pressbooks Kitchen project. These are stand-alone materials that anyone else is welcome to use and are openly licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY Attribution License.

About the Workshop

Open Educational Resources are like a fine meal, but how can you make them even better? In this hands-on workshop you will explore H5P, a tool for adding interactive activities to your OERs, many of them types of activities not available in typical content development systems. The advantages of H5P are that it is not tied to a single platform, what you produce is web-standard HTML5 that can be exported, shared, and remixed for use elsewhere. You will discover how to find examples of H5P used in your discipline to give you ideas what is possible. Next, you will get to experience remixing existing H5P content and explore the more than 40 activity types you can use. In addition, you will get time to experiment with making your own H5P content from scratch.

For Workshop Participants

To be ready for the workshop, you will need an online place for creating H5P content. Here are a few options, use whichever is most convenient:

  1. If this is your first experience with H5P or want the easiest route, 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 perfect way to get started.
  2. 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).
  3. If your LMS is enabled for H5P (check with your technical support) you can use that as a space to create H5P.
  4. 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/

We also will be using a desktop H5P editor that should work on any desktop or laptop computer. Download and install from https://lumi.education/

If you have those in place, 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 in 1993 and has not left the web since. He has brought innovative ideas to his work with the New Media Consortium and the University of Mary Washington, and now is on his own as an independent consultant (see http://cog.dog). An early proponent of blogs and RSS, since 2003 Alan has shared his ideas and discoveries at CogDogBlog.com. Alan works from home in 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. Having started his career at Maricopa he is excited to return, even if just virtually.


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

1 Comment

Leave a Reply