These are some rough notes from a BC Campus workshop I attended. These workships via BC Campus are an incredibly useful resource for faculty, curriculum designers, instructional designers and anyone interested in teaching, learning and technology. The utility of my notes are in the links. The “accuracy” of the notes merely reflect my interests.
Today, Thursday, April 29 at 9:00 am, I attended a webinar from the BC Campus on Pressbooks and H5P for creating interactive textbooks. I am interested in how they are doing that AND how they are supporting it institutionally. This presentation was facilitated by Alan Levine and featured Steel Wagstaff, Educational Product Manager for Pressbooks who shared much about the features and capabilities of Pressbooks, how H5P integrates with it, examples worth looking at, and provided some insights into future directions for the platform.
I have linked below some of the interesting links and examples provided.
Steel Wagstaff is coming from Wisconsin where they were working on open homework systems to remove the financial barriers created by commercial textbook publishers..
Wisconsin is using H5P because it is open and works well with Pressbooks. With H5P, they are able to put in interactive components into open textbooks that are hosted in Pressbooks.
Here are some of the things that they were looking for:
- Accessibility
- Open Source
- Interoperable
- Supports Annotations
- Interactivity in an activity pane,
- Connects to the Moodle gradebook.
Wagstaff gave examples of tools that were home grown and found problems with programmers moving on or retiring.
They have a Porteguese language book with embedded recordings and activities.
This was an early project in Pressbooks and H5P in Wisconsin. This book saw improvements in student learning. They were able to bring interactive textbooks to subjects that were not even covered by commercial textbooks like Tibetan.
Hypothesis and H5P will eventually speak to one another.
https://github.com/hypothesis/client/issues/509
Needed:
Pressbooks network with H5P installed.
There was a review of H5P and the different categories or kinds of activities that are available:
- Simple quizzes
- Image related activities
- including virtual tours using annotated 360 degree pictures
- Interactive videos
- video can be stored anywhere
- YouTube,
- Vimeo,
- home server, etc.
- Complex learning activities
- course presentation,
- interactive book,
- and branching scenario)
The branching activities that are basically a rival to Captivate or Storyline.
Arley Curruthers Corona Virus Journal
You can make new activities or adapt from a library of already created content.
There are great resources about what is happening now in h5p at: https://kitchen.opened.ca/2021/03/29/feedback-not-created-same/
Metadata fields are critical because they let you know what the re-use rights are and what learning objectives are addressed by the learning object.
OER Activity Sourcebook
https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/oersourcebook/
We looked at the pressbooks.directory to find books that were openly licensed with H5P activities. https://pressbooks.directory/
Users can be able to easily list and find the different activities in a book. https://wisc.pb.unizin.org/oersourcebook/h5p-listing/
I am particularly interested in this work because one of the big arguments for commercial textbook publishers and homework platforms, is that textbooks need more interactivity (therefore we should contract with them). H5P is a way to easily include that interactivity.
