H5P for WordPress

I’ve been playing with H5P on WordPress, and am particularly interested in its ease of use, features and in some instances, how it compares with other applications.  Some of the things possible on it remind me of Hot Potatoes which has been around since 1998 with the difference that with H5P they are easily embedded in WordPress sites or used on Moodle, other features are quite interesting (Interactive Video) and have a lot of potential uses in higher ed.

My general inclination is to open-source products, but I am not an evangelist for all things open-source by any means and see a lot of good in many of the commercial products, many of which have excellent and easy to use features available for free for educators.  In other words, as a pragmatic decision maker, I see benefits in either and it really comes down to the usability of a product.

As a WordPress plugin, it was easy to get started as it is installed on the TRUBOX server, and I suspect it will be on the Moodle server sometime in the next year (or possibly sooner)

General pros:

– It is open-source, and it fairly easy to use and free and has over 20 possible course uses ranging from the simpler (graph) to the more interactive and robust (interactive video).

– It is responsive and renders nicely on mobile devices

– As a WordPress plugin it works quite seamlessly

Here are some of the activities that may be more likely to be used or are more intriguing that can be created in H5P.  A full list is available on the H5P site.

  • Arithmetic quiz – create time-based arithmetic quizzes
  • Chart – Generate bar and pie charts
  • Collage – create a collage of multiple images
  • Course Presentation – create a presentation with interactive slides
  • Drag and drop – create drag and drop tasks with images
  • Find the Hotspot – create image hotspots for users to find
  • Image Hotspots – create an image with multiple info hotspots
  • Image Jxtaposition – Create interactive images
  • Audio Recorder – Create an audio recording
  • appear.in for Chat and Talk – embed an appear.in room
  • Interactive Video – Create videos enriched with interactions
  • Memory Game – Create the classic image pairing game
  • Multiple Choice – Create flexible multiple choice questions
  • Personality Quiz – Create personality quizzes
  • Quesionanaire – Create questionnnaire to receive feedback
  • Quiz (question set) – creat a sequence of various question types
  • Single Choice Set – Create questiosn with one correct answer
  • Summary – Create tasks with a list of statements
  • Timeline – Create a timeline of events with multimedia
  • True False Question – Create True False questions
  • Twitter User feed – Show your Twitter feed with H5P

General cons:

– A few of my bigger wants for it are that it doesn’t have a preview which would be helpful.

– It also lacks some of the versatility found in other tools.

–  It’s free, so those may be minor quibbles, but my experience is that the simpler something is the more likely it is to be widely used.  It’s not yet on the TRU Moodle server so once that’s available, it will open up a host of possibilities not currently likely to be widely used.

I will add to these initial thoughts in the days to come and then parse subsequent posts with focus on some of the features.