What is H5P?

Today we’re looking at something new for this year, H5P. H5P is a content creation app available on the web and in Moodle at the University of Portsmouth. H5P allows you to create interesting and varied interactive content like Video Quizzes, Flashcards, Picture Sliders, Memory Games, and more! You can do all this really quickly through an easy to understand interface – with no coding knowledge required.

What does the app look like and how do I use it?

H5P content picker screenshotThe H5P website allows you to sign up for an account and save created interactive elements online. If you use the app within Moodle you don’t have to sign up, and you create your content directly inside the familiar Moodle user interface.

H5P gives you a variety of options when it comes to creating content. While we won’t go into the whole list here, a selection of the most interesting options include:

  • Multiple choice questions – create flexible multiple choice questions.
  • Course Presentations – create a presentation with flexible slides.
  • Interactive Video – create videos with questions for your audience to answer as they are watching.
  • Drag and Drop – create drag and drop tasks with images.
  • Flashcards – create stylish and modern flashcards.
  • Agamotto (Image blender) – create a series of overlaid images which fade in and out over each other.

H5P takes you through setting up whichever type of content you choose, with varying degrees of success. Some content types are easier to get to grips with than others, though to mitigate some of this complexity there is an active community forum, whose members are more than willing to help experienced and new users alike. Of course in addition to this, our own elearn team offer training and assistance for staff who want to get to grips with H5P.

Each content type has pre-made examples for you to try out, this helps you visualise whether a certain content type fits what you are trying to accomplish, though as always we’ve found that the best way to explore all the options that H5P offers is to sign up for an account and have a have a go with the different tools yourself.

Whilst creating content on the H5P site is excellent for embedding it a variety of places, the Moodle integration is really good if you want to record the scores students get in each of the activities, as H5P will record them in the Moodle gradebook, using H5P from the website won’t do this.

It’s worth noting that you’ll find that the tools that are offered on the main H5P website may differ from those that are available in Moodle directly.

How could this app help me?

H5P is an excellent way to create new and interesting types of course content for students. It’s easy to get stuck creating the same sorts of activities for students over and over, so H5P offers a simple way to expand what you can offer students studying your course.

It’s also really useful for students who want to create website content for their projects really quickly and easily.

If you’d like some more information on H5P and what it can do for you, contact elearn and ask about our training programme.