Introduction
Educators and trainers have been looking for tools to help them effectively organize and present their learning content, as well as easily build learning exercises or evaluations. There are a lot of tools out there, but many are either costly, require a deep learning curve, face hosting issues, or pose huge hurdles for integrating into users’ digital ecosystem. These challenges have discouraged educators or trainers from using them, which resulted in less effective teaching and learning outcomes than they had hoped.
The good news is that H5P objects do not have the same challenges mentioned above. The objects are free to use and can be accessed on h5p.org (a paid version on h5p.com provides access to more advanced features or hosting service). In addition, they are easy to use, and the majority of them meet accessibility standards. For now, most of the existing learning management systems (LMS) have integrated H5P objects with plugins or learning tools interoperability (LTI) integration, and many popular, public content-management platforms (for example, WordPress) accept and run them too. On top of these, the most exciting part is that once you create an object, you can reuse it by either duplicating it in the same course or you can download it from a course in a platform and upload it to another course or another LMS or WordPress. This will potentially save educators and trainers many hours of work.
As an instructional designer working at a university supporting faculties developing online courses, I have explored the H5P objects and used some creatively to help achieve the teaching and learning objectives. The easiness and usefulness of them inspired me to share my ideas and examples with colleagues and the public. And this is how this book was created. The majority of the examples were created by myself for online courses at MacEwan University, with a few from other sources, for example, Pressbooks.
It is worth noting that this book does not have a goal of analyzing the features of the objects and aligning them with pedagogical theories or best teaching and learning practices. Instead, it focuses on sharing examples and can be viewed as a resource book.
For ease of use, the book is organized into four chapters: presenting content, engaging with content, assessing learning, and practicing and applying learning. To get the most out of this book, it is recommended that you first skim quickly through the pages to get a general idea of what objects they are. Later, when you need to find an object with a specific function, you will know where to find the example.
I hope you find this book useful, and if you later create objects that you believe could benefit others, and would like to share with the public, feel free to contact me at guanj3@macewan.ca or DigitalScholarship@macewan.ca.
