This month’s blog post was contributed by Shannon Brenner, Instructional Designer & Adjunct Faculty at Northeast Iowa Community College.
How many of your students complete their reading assignments? Even after working hard to find free and accessible Open Educational Resources for learners, I hear from many faculty, and see with my own courses, that many students still avoid or barely skim their assigned learning materials. I’m not sure if this is a “Digital Age” phenomenon, or one that has plagued faculty throughout the history of higher education. Regardless, it is a point of frustration for instructors and instructional designers alike.
There is hope on the horizon, though! According to eLearning Industry, “Cognitive science research tells us that breaking content into logical segments makes the information easier to process, learn, and remember.” At my college, we are finding that chunking readings into smaller pieces and weaving in interactive practice significantly helps motivate learners to engage with their learning materials. I have also found that students are motivated by low-stakes points—I offer unlimited attempts with the best score going to the grade book—and fun and easy formative practice activities.
OER lend themselves particularly well to this strategy since you can remix and reuse anything with a Creative Commons license. To that end, I have chosen H5P for this month’s resource highlight. This free tool allows users to curate and chunk OER content in engaging, interactive packages.
What is H5P?
H5P is a tool that makes it easy to create, share, and reuse HTML5 content. Essentially, it allows us to combine OER text with interactive activities to help students learn and practice content. You can build content that allows students to read text and then answer questions about it, create interactive videos that stop periodically to ask questions, course presentations with interactive content, and more. It’s a great way to remix and reuse your Creative Commons-licensed OER content in a fun way.
Who can create with H5P?
It’s important to note that there are two different H5P sites. H5P.org is the free version that allows anyone to create an account and build content. The content can be shared via link or embedded into sites or an LMS, but the free version does not integrate into your LMS grade book. In order to get that feature, you’ll need to go to H5P.com and purchase a license (or convince your school to buy an institutional license!). That being said, the free version provides access to all of their content options and allows unlimited content creation. If you’re okay with manual grading, or using these activities as ungraded practice, the free version will work just fine.
As an added bonus, H5P houses a repository of publicly shared H5P activities that you can download and customize. The database is still relatively new, but is growing by the day. I recommend checking there for activities before starting to build your own.
What can you build with H5P?
There are many types of activities and content curation options available in H5P. Some of my favorites include crossword puzzles, drag-and-drop activities, interactive lessons, branching scenarios, and polling. Here’s a full list of what you can create; they add new content options frequently.
Here are a few examples of activities that combine OER content and interactivity that I’ve created for my current composition course. Feel free to click around and complete the activities if you’d like. You can also click the “reuse” link in the bottom of the activity to download an H5P file that you can upload and customize in your own H5P account.
Interactive Book: Descriptive Writing
Branching Scenario: Grammar “Escape Room” Activity
Conclusion
While OER materials are a step in the right direction, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that just using free materials is not enough. Learners simply do not take in information by reading lengthy texts. It is our job as instructors and course developers to find new, meaningful ways to curate and improve our OER content. H5P is an easy way to accomplish this goal and consistently garners positive feedback from the students and faculty who use it.