I was recently approached to evaluate some content for EduHack, which is an Erasmus+ project. The courseware will enable university educators to produce digitally-supported learning experiences, and experiment with innovative approaches and tools.
Though there were many options relating to my interests and my work, I ultimately decided to look at a lesson called ‘Create Digital Educational Resources’, which utilises H5p to create open digital resources.
In the activity, I was able to read about the tool, watch a tutorial video, and use H5p’s resources to create my own activity. I decided to use the H5P WordPress plugin, as I have to blog about my evaluation, so it seemed best to cover all bases in one space.
I’ve heard a great deal about H5P, but never had the time to sit down and try it out myself, which I now feel was a bit of a failing. I appreciate that it’s open, and that it prompts the creator to add an image description for accessibility and to add copyright information for an image. For my EduHack task, I could have created activities like:
- Create videos enriched with interactions
- Give instant feedback to essays
- Create a questionnaire to receive feedback
- Drag and drop image matching game
- Create an image with a question and answer
- Create a task with missing words in a text
Since I regularly use other tools to complete most of those tasks, and I wanted to create something relevant to my teaching, I created a quick image with hotspots to explain Bloom’s Taxonomy:
This is not my finest work. I’m a bit strapped for time.
However, I see the potential in H5P, and in the lesson I evaluated. The lesson itself was straightforward – I was able to read, watch tutorials, follow the instructions and create a reusable resource. I was pointed to useful follow up activities, like the OU’s ‘Creating Open Educational Resources‘ MOOC. I felt like i was able to dedicate more time to creating than working through the lesson, and I was also interested in many of the others. It’s useful that the lesson itself will be an OER, points the user to an open tool, and helps users to in turn create OERs.
Having worked on a similar project, I know that educators can face ‘initiative/project overload’, but I found the format and brevity of each activity refreshing. Busy staff can quickly run through the ‘Read, Watch, Do’ format and build upon their skills from that point, availing of additional resources if need be. I also think that the variety of topics will prove useful for those that want to dip in and out, or visit topics when they have a specific need. I look forward to exploring the content in more dept, and playing around with H5p, too.
