Creating Interactive Objects With H5P To Spice Up Online Content
Have you ever dreamt of creating your own exercisers for your students? Or even to add comments and questions to a video that you or someone else recorded? H5P could be right for you!
You Said “H5P”?
Do you know H5P? It is neither a camera nor a golf club. It is a free open-source development environment for interactive content. H5P simply means HTML5 Package. Not very poetic, but to rapidly create interactive objects that will enrich your online content, this is a very promising tool!
Up to rather recently, the creation of interactive presentations, of videos punctuated by questions or a fun applet was reserved to specialized software such as Adobe Captivate or Storyboard: expensive, powerful and sometimes heavy to operate. Now it is within everyone’s reach thanks to the open-source H5P.
What Can Be Done With H5P?
The H5P project proposes an environment to create various interactive objects, easy to set up, reuse and share. Up until now, there are 36 types of interactive objects that can be created with H5P, including:
- Interactive presentation of content
- Interactive video
- Audio recording
- Multiple-choice questions
As H5P is free and open, we can expect to see other types of interactive objects appear in the next few years. If you are a developer in your spare time, you can even come up with new fun applets.
For each type of content, a template is provided to help you understand how everything works. You advance intuitively in the interface.
After finding some pictures and a few clicks, I was able to create a little exerciser for my daughter who is in the 1st grade.
Sample exerciser created with H5P.
I had a bit of fun adding interactive elements to the first 2 minutes of a video that I found in Catherine Rhéaume’s Real Life Story.
In the H5P interface, I chose “interactive video” and entered the address for Catherine’s YouTube video. I then added a few interactive elements, such as comments or questions, simply to break up the rhythm or force students to think about what they are watching or doing. Let me show you how I did this in a video.
A quick demonstration: How to add interactive elements to a video [in French].
The richer version of the video (there could be an even more serious version, I admit) looks like this:
The enhanced version of the same video.
To Use H5P
Up until now, modules have been developed in Moodle, Dupral and WordPress to integrate H5P functions directly.
To create an interactive object, you can:
- Go to the site H5P.org. If you use Moodle, the H5P plugin that is provided will allow you to easily import the objects that you have created.
- Create directly in Moodle.
Since June 2017, DECclic offers, in Moodle, the H5P plugin to all of its members. All you have to do is choose “interactive content” in the activity selector.
