OER – Troy Patterson

I’ve been a proponent of H5P. H5P creates interactive activities. I’ve long used it within Moodle to create activities for students to utilize. H5P is open-source. This means that I don’t have to worry about them switching to a paid model and losing all of my material.

H5P has a wide variety of interactive tools. These include Interactive Videos, Flashcards, Dictation Activities, Speak the Word, and much, much more.

However, most teachers only use Google Classroom. Google Classroom is “easy” to use. It also doesn’t do much.

While I have mostly used H5P in Moodle, I have used Lumi as well. Lumi is a stand-alone H5P creation and editing tool. You can download the full application (Mac, Windows, or Linux), so that you own and control all of the data and information. You can use their cloud version as well.

While I was using Lumi, I realized that it will export activities as a web page. Hm. If it’s a web page, one could put the link in Google Classroom. I created an activity, exported that activity to a web page, uploaded the web page to Google Drive, and then linked it in Google Classroom.

Guess what? Google removed the ability to serve web pages from Google Drive, so one still needs to find a place to host the activity. Lumi still makes it easy to create, but you can also use the H5P WordPress plugin. Or, you can take advantage of the power and ease of use of Moodle.

Thanks to the wonderful Geoff Cain, I found this little tidbit sharing some new OER materials based on H5P. The eCampusOntario H5P Studio is a site for sharing H5P materials. (H5P is an open source project that provides a variety of rich, mostly interactive experiences. It is well integrated with another open source project (Moodle) that I like and support). The materials on the eCampusOntario H5P Studio are mostly Creative Commons licensed.

I need to learn more about H5P. This site may one way of finding some practical examples. The set up of the site is also interesting. It is a simple catalog presentation. There are search fields on the side. This is simple and effective. There are only a few entries currently, but I’m hoping that this will continue to grow. Even if it is focused at the college level, examples could be useful. Since the resources are Creative Commons (many are CC-BY-NC-SA), they can be remixed.

Here is their “About Us” page text:

eCampusOntario H5P Studio is your one stop shop to create, share, and discover interactive learning objects. This site uses H5P, an open source plugin, to allow content authors to easily create interactive content for their courses or other instructional projects. For more information about H5P, please refer to their website: h5p.org.

eCampusOntario H5P Studio is provided as part of our set of Open Publishing tools. This platform was developed by the innovative team at Wilfrid Laurier University Library. Special thanks to Yasin Dahi, Joanne Oud, Dillon Moore, and Gohar Ashoughian for their participation in this project.
From their About page

Check it out.