EDCI 337 Blog Post 8 – Interactivity with H5P

Image retrieved from  Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Teaching & Learning Centre

What is H5P?

H5P is “a free, versatile, open source authoring tool integrated with WordPress and many other platforms that allow you to quickly create, share and reuse a wide variety of interactive and engaging learning activities” (Watt, 2022, W-9). Some activities include multiple-choice questions, true or false questions, fill-in-the-blank questions, drag-and-drop, image hotspots, and branching scenarios. (Watt, 2022, W-9).

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Prompt:

What was your experience of trying H5P? Which of the activities do you think you would make the most use of in your teaching context and what would you use them to do? Which ones do you think require the most resources to create?

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My First Experience with H5P

While playing around with H5P, I thought ‘why didn’t my teachers ever use this to teach my class?’. H5P was user-friendly, however, intuitive to learn. The icons to embed activities were simple and easy to find.  While playing around with the activities, I would occasionally add a feature that I did not mean to. However, all I had to do is click on the trash can icon to undo my mistake.

The hardest part was determining the timing of my activities within my video. I wanted my activities to pop up at a natural time so that the activities would be cohesive with the video. I had to edit the timing of the activities right down to the milliseconds.

First H5P attempt:

How a student changed her study habits by TEDxTalks (2019): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7e7gtU3PHY

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Most used activities

I think all of the activities from H5P would be great to incorporate as interactive activities in a classroom setting. However,  the ones that I found that I gravitated towards the most were the multiple-choice questions and the True and False questions. I think I used these two activities the most because they are the ones that I have personally used the most while in school; I had a sense of familiarity with these forms of assessment. That being said, both activities are great ways to test a student’s knowledge because the different options can trigger a student to be distracted by the multiple choices; multiple choice and true and false are more than just guessing games. They test if the student was retaining the information and if they really paying attention.

Out of the two activities, I think the multiple-choice questions require more resources. Since there needs to be more than one choice, the options that are the wrong choice cannot be too obvious that they are incorrect because that would be too easy for the student. However, multiple choice questions do encourage the student to think critically because most of the time they would most likely think logically to settle on one choice.

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Connection with Theories and Principles

Below are some examples of how Mayer’s Theory of Multimedia Learning  was used in the H5P activity:

• Segmenting (Watt, 2022, W-3): Within the interactive video, instead of having all the questions in one section of the video, I placed the questions evenly dispersed. By doing it this way,  it forces the watcher to be engaged with the video until the end. Furthermore, it prevents the watcher from being overly stimulated since there are breaks between the questions.
• Signaling (Watt, 2022, W-2): Throughout the interactive video, pop-up questions appear.  The questions clearly signal to the watcher that it’s time to complete the short quiz. There is no confusion as to where to click in order to answer the questions.

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What I wish were different

While going through my H5P activity again, I noticed a few things that I wish I could incorporate:

• Closed-Captioning options: The video that I used was from YouTube. On Youtube, the viewer has the option to turn on/off closed-captioning. However, while playing my interactive video, I noticed that option is no longer available. I think it would be very beneficial to have closed-captioning in multiple languages. This would be helpful for hard-of-hearing individuals, English Language Learners, and many more. Having one improvement can benefit many; this aligns with the UDL principle of representation (UDL, 2022). 
• Voice to Action: While interacting with the interactive video, I thought it would be cool if individuals could interact not solely by clicking the screen. For example, individuals who have a physical disability with their arms, most likely could not easily use a mouse very easily; therefore, they could not participate in H5P activities. Instead, by using their voice and clear instructions, perhaps they could participate in the activities. This reflects the UDL principle of Action and Expression (UDL, 2022).

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Additional H5P Activity

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Reference:

TEDxTalks. (2019). How a student changed her study habits [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7e7gtU3PHY

UDL. (2022, September 2). The UDL guidelines. Retrieved https://udlguidelines.cast.org/ 

Watt (2022). W-2: How Do We Learn?. Retrieved from: https://edtechuvic.ca/edci337/2022/08/29/w2-how-do-we-learn/

Watt (2022). W-3: Multimedia Design For Learning. Retrieved from: https://edtechuvic.ca/edci337/2022/09/17/w3-multimedia-design-for-learning/

Watt (2022). W-9: Active and Passive Learning. Retrieved from: https://edtechuvic.ca/edci337/2022/10/29/w9-active-and-passive-learning/