Active learning with H5P: Still a great asset

Author: Phil Chambers | Sep 14, 2021 H5P Active Learning

After my August break, and Fall courses rolling out, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on a tool that I and other designers often use to incorporate interactivity and active learning onto online courses.

It’s likely experienced designers have heard of H5P. It has been around for a few years now and continues to improve as time goes by. There are some quirks to using it, which I will get to later on, but overall I find it to be a useful and free way to help students check their knowledge of core concepts. Below are a few ways I still use H5P, but first, I’ll briefly go over the different versions.

Free vs SasS 

While you can use H5P as a Service through H5P.com to accomplish this, you need only to have access to the free H5P (though installing it on a private server like a Wordpress site would be better). For this demo, I am not going to dive into the Canvas LTI for integrating directly into the grade book, or recording student usage analytics ¹

Instead, I am going to evaluate some of the instances of H5P’s activities and their popularity among instructors that I work with. So, how do I usually pitch H5P?

Low-Stakes Quizzes 

The general idea behind using H5P on courses that I design is that it gives students a way to gauge their understanding of a certain topic or concept. Consider the following module structure:

Introduction Page
Learning Materials
├─ Lecture and Reading A
├─ Lecture and Reading B
Assessments
├─ Discussion Board
├─ Assignment
Conclusion Page

The learning materials pages on courses are where we can add in the active learning elements by using H5P activities. They help to not only split up the information by including a review portion at the end of key concepts, but they provide students with a low-stakes² quiz, or activity to test their understanding of said concepts. By adding these to your course learning materials pages, you can prepare students for the kinds of topics they would expect to find on the more important formative and summative assessments.

Activity Types 

Here is a brief overview of some of the most useful H5P activities on courses I develop.

Course Presentations 

Think of these as embedded PowerPoint or Google Sheet files, sans the animations, but with the ability to ask comprehension questions. There are some limitations to the way slides can be presented, but the basics are there including:

• Images and shapes
• Font size changes
• Font color changes
• Embedded videos
• Embedded audio
• Interactive videos (with their own questions)
• Tables (though these are not particularly good looking)

Then there are the quiz-style questions that can be added as well such as:

• Multiple choice questions
• Single choice questions
• True/false
• Fill in the blanks
• Drag and drop
• Summary
• Drag text
• Mark the words
• Dialog cards

Other features include:

• Continuous text areas
• Exportable text areas
• Embedded Twitter feeds

Finally, there are more advanced options such as Active Surface Mode, which allows you to remove the ability to select a slide and instead lets you decide which slide you want the learner to see next. This is essentially done through links and buttons that jump to the slide you want the user to move to. This is great for a choose your own adventure kind of question for your learners.

Demo 

Single Questions 

I have grouped the following H5P activities into one section here because they often fulfill the same function: A quick, single question after reading a text or watching a video (more on that in a minute).

Activities such as:

Multiple Choice 

True/False 

Question Set 

If you want to make a group of questions after a reading, lecture, or so on, then the Question Set is great for the job. I use this a lot for quick, self-checked comprehension questions on a variety of courses. Be aware, though, that you are limited to the following question types:

• Multiple Choice
• Drag and Drop
• Fill in the Blanks
• Mark the Words
• Drag Text
• True/False Question

Demo 

Interactive Video 

This is a type of activity I tend not to use very often because the LMS I work with has its own built in version of it. I would use this, however, if I did not have an existing solution, as it is a very simple way of attaching comprehension questions to videos (even YouTube videos, albeit with limited functionality on those).

Should you use it? 

Give it a go! The time it takes to create these low-stakes activities in H5P is fairly minimal, and once you get the hang of how it works (and which activities have certain question limitations such as the Quiz Question Set), you can generate quite a few of these for your courses. If you want to record answers for these activities, it might be worth signing up to the paid version through h5p.com. To just try it out though, it’s as simple as installing it for free on a Moodle installation, Wordpress website, or even using the public version of h5p.org.