A certain dog was barking in the OE Global Connect yard and brought this one to my attention. You can sign up to get regularly updates of lots of really interesting Open Ed and Ed Tech related resources via email too. Apparently Nele Hirsch, one of our Open Ed peers over in Germany, has created a website where anyone can create H5P content to try out the authoring tool.
There are a couple of interesting aspects to this. The first is that unlike H5P.org, or maybe even the H5P install you have at your work (like if you use Moodle), Nele’s website includes additional content types that are not in the regular hub. There are loads of content types in the H5P hub by default, but readers of this blog will know I’m a big fan of Oliver Tacke’s work. Oliver makes custom H5P content types for clients (he is truly great to work with). Not all of his custom projects make their way into the main hub, but the great thing about the Open Source side of H5P is you can upload the content types he makes and then users on that instance can make content with them. The very first time I did this “use a custom content type” approach was actually a customization of the dialog cards that Papi Jo in the H5P forums had created that basically did what the flashcards content type does now.
Anyway, Nele’s website is interesting in one other way. No login needed. Translated to English,
When you go to create an H5P you are brought to the dashboard of the site with limited access, but enough to see the H5P hub and build what ever you like. I love this approach. Back in 2022, I ran a workshop at the OTESSA online conference, The eLearning Design Charrette: A H5P Workshop,
If you’ve ever run a workshop getting people to try a new technology, especially one that runs online you’ll know that just the sign-up and logging in process can eat your entire session. For OTESSA I wanted to get away from having participants have to log into a WordPress or Pressbooks site, or any other site. The point of the workshop was to try H5P, so I was going to focus on that. I’d found a plugin for my use case, WP Frontend Admin, that allowed me to create a page on my Design Charrette site that showed the site admin. I was able to customize what was shown, so naturally, only the H5P editor. When participants went to the site there was a page that was just a collection of the H5Ps people made, and the other page was the editor. It worked pretty well, espeically doing it for the first time. I’ve since decommissioned the site. If I were to run a workshop now, I’d probably lean on Nele’s site.
Photo by Henry Chuy on Unsplash
4 responses to “EinstiegH5P for trying out H5P Creation”
Yes, yes, the H5P Hub. Stay tuned: I also have built my own H5P Hub server software that can mirror what’s served in Norway and, since you have full control, can add other content types. I’ll set up such a server shortly.
Then you (simply) tell your H5P platform to use the other server, and then you can suddenly install/update way more content types conveniently.
Oliver I think you get the “fastest commenter on the Blogwall” badge! Thank you!
This sounds like a really interesting project. I look forward to seeing the update on OTACKE LAB.
Those barking dogs also howl at the moon 😉
Nele is so brilliant. I recall first knowing of her when she wrote that she built a version of pechaflickr that worked in German.
It’s interesting that EinstiegH5P runs in WordPress, and Nele built something that gets you inside the WP authoring space without the usual login. I recall the first versions she created worked in drupal…
There’s also https://learnful.ca/ that has an H5P creator space, built by Yasin Dahi who did the eCampusOntario H5P Studio.
Very cool work going on across the Atlantic!
Oh that’s interesting to know that the first versions were in Drupal. It’s a really slick set up. One thing my design charrette version didn’t do was reset everyday. I left it up for about a year or so and then took it down so I wouldn’t have to manage an open window like that.
I knew about Learnful, and Lumi Education also has an online version. For the workshop I steered clear of these two due to account set ups. It was tight on time and I always found that kind of thing chews up so much time in short workshops.
Much of my work moved to the Lumi desktop app but it is not kept up like the online one anymore so things go a little weird sometimes.