Jump to: Pedagogy in Practice | Academic Technology Tips | Did You Know?
Participate in the H5P Project and discover interactive content tools
Pedagogy in Practice
By Scott Wojtanowski
If you are a regular reader of the Educational Development Digest, you have likely heard us describe the value of incorporating retrieval practice with your students – we even have a three week short course about it. We have also presented readers with different examples of how you could use existing technology tools, like Kaltura’s In-Video Quiz tool, can be used to support retrieval practice. This month we are going to provide you with another example with a new tool that many colleagues across Minnesota State are exploring, H5P.
If you have missed the buzz around H5P, here is the scoop. H5P is a set of interactive content authoring tools that integrates with a variety of learning management systems, including D2L Brightspace which we use at the colleges and universities of Minnesota State. One common way that faculty members are using H5P content types like course presentation or interactive book is to present a bit of instructional information (e.g. video, text, images) to learners while also providing various practice opportunities for these learners to check their understanding of the information they were just presented using individual questions (multiple choice, true/false, fill-in the blank, drag and drop, mark the words) or a collection of these question types in a question set. In this way, learners are not distracted by navigating back and forth from the content tool to the quiz tool. Using these types of H5P content types doesn’t really change the way instruction traditionally occurs, but it does provide faculty with a new way to represent content.
H5P makes available a variety of sophisticated interactive content types that are web-based and fully accessible that range from easy to create to rather complex. Listed below is an infographic from peggy french at Mohawk College that shows a number of content types available in H5P and peggy’s assessment comparing the richness of the experience with the time involved to create the activity. For instance, content types of Flashcards take little time to create and also provide little bits of information to students, whereas the Branching Scenario content type provides students with a rich experience, but takes a tremendous amount of time for an author to create.
Historically, content authoring tools have had a steep learning curve and expensive costs, limiting their use by time and cash strapped faculty. As a result, many fellow faculty have been resigned to utilize interactive tools provided through textbook publishers, often with an added cost to students. Those deeply involved in the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement have been enamored with the ways that H5P has made sharing through Creative Commons licensing a key component of their product and within their growing OER Hub platform. Some faculty have been able to either locate activities that have already been developed or have collaborated with others to create their own interactive activities. Not only have these colleagues been able to ditch their connections to costly publisher sites, but these colleagues have been able to create their own high-quality, customized learning activities.
If you are interested in trying out H5P in your courses, we encourage you to sign-up to participate in this project sponsored by the Learning Environment Committee of the ASA Technology Council.
Guided H5P Instructional Videos
Academic Technology Tips
By Brock Behling
In this month’s pedagogy in practice feature, we introduced readers to H5P. Yes, the availability of content authoring tools for education is nothing new. Tools like Softchalk, Adobe’s Captivate, Articulate, Lodestar, and iSpring all provide similar functionality and have been used for years. As noted above these other tools can be intimidating for the uninitiated. So, is H5P similarly complex?
In this month’s Academic Technology Tip, we share some guided instructional videos that were prepared for the participants of the Minnesota State H5P project. These videos document the process to create a few commonly used content types from H5P and shows the different ways these materials can be added to D2L Brightspace with student scores sent to the grades tool.
All these videos are available on this Kaltura MediaSpace playlist. Additionally, individual links are listed below. These were created by request by the H5P participants.
- [H5P] Creating H5P Content Types – Navigating multiple content types and trying out the Question Set
- [H5P] Existing Activities in D2L Brightspace – Inserting H5P Contents Method 1 – Using the “Existing Activities” function of the Content tool in D2L Brightspace to insert H5P content that is included in the grades tool.
- [H5P] Insert Stuff – Inserting H5P Contents Method 2 – Using the “Insert Stuff” function available in the HTML editor of D2L Brightspace to insert H5P content that is added to the grades tool.
- [H5P] Interactive Book Content Type – Providing an overview of the “interactive book” content type, as this appears to be the most versatile in its use.
Media Management Vendors to be Announced later this month
Did You Know?
By Megan Babel
The University of Minnesota and Minnesota State share a contract with Kaltura MediaSpace for media management services. To comply with each systems procurement procedures, a joint request for proposal (RFP) was issued this winter, and finalists are expected to be announced the week of April 11.
Watch the vendor demonstrations
Minnesota State faculty, staff, and students are welcome to view the vendor demonstrations planned for the week of April 18, 2022, and provide feedback. The day-long sessions will be hosted in Zoom with automatic live transcription and recordings will be professionally captioned.
Please RSVP to the events to receive a calendar invitation for each day of vendor demonstrations. The invitation will be updated when the names of finalists have been made public. By RSVPing to the events, you will also receive an email with a link to the recording of this session and a link to provide feedback.
The vendor demonstrations will consist of company overviews and demonstrations of different scenarios throughout the day, with opportunities for questions.
- April 19 – Day 1 of Vendor Demonstrations – RSVP
- April 20 – Day 2 of Vendor Demonstrations – RSVP
- April 21 – Day 3 of Vendor Demonstrations – RSVP
- April 22 – Day 4 of Vendor Demonstrations – RSVP
Participate in Usability Evaluations
During the week of April 25, there will be a vendor usability evaluation week through the University of Minnesota’s Usability Lab. Those who are randomly selected will complete tasks in a provided scenario while thinking out loud.
The evaluation sessions will be completed over Zoom, and honorarium gift cards are available to participants ($40/faculty; $25/student). This opportunity only allows for three (3) participants per vendor, and those who agree must avoid watching the vendor demonstrations.
From the ASA Technology Council
Watch the following short video overview of the last ASA Technology Council held on February 9, 2022.
