In 2018 or thereabouts, my manager asked to review some of the short, online lessons from the EduHack project, and after sifting through some of them, I landed on a lesson about creating digital resources using H5P<\/a>. I became fixated on H5P. At the time, we had just finished leading the All Aboard project<\/a>, which produced open, interactive lessons on a variety of technologies where users could receive digital badges for completion. Those resources were mostly devloped in Storyline, and some in Rise toward the end to save time. I was conscious that those licenses are expensive, Storyline requires some training, and while Rise is simple to author with, it’s still part of a pricier package. I decided to explore H5P in more depth, authoring in H5P.org, installing the plugin on my own WordPress site, and ultimately requesting a pilot period from the company for H5P.com service that would integrate via an LTI with Blackboard Learn. I decided that for our staff and students, it was best to integrate the tool properly. It would be too much to ask staff to author elsewhere, create accounts, etc. From my testing, I also discovered that H5P allowed users to publish fully open or shared content in Blackboard, content could be easily CC licensed, and files were easily downloadable for reuse elsewhere. I was now determined to ‘open the closed<\/a>‘. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2019, the national project I was working on afforded me the chance to facilitate a pilot on digital resources with our staff, and I initially had about 20 participants authoring with H5P and some other tools. Of course, by spring of 2020, the world changed and we went from pilot to mainstream. We purchased a site license in the summer of 2020 and I facilitated learning design workshops multiple times a week for months to help staff remix existing or new learning materials into asychronous online activities. Given the situation, I had to focus on getting materials ready for students, and only focus on open practice with staff that had the capacity or interest to engage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Given the emergency period, and that I was supporting this work on my own, I haven’t had much time to critically reflect on H5P as a tool beyond my initial work. This might be my first opportunity to tease some issues out, which is useful. I believe that my early approach was pragmatic and well-intentioned, but I had only set out to support small numbers of staff to design well, now we have 260-something authors, which is a bit beyond my control! <\/p>\n\n\n\n Broadly, affordance <\/em>refers to the range of functions and constraints that an object provides for, and places upon, structurally situated subjects.<\/p>\n(David and Chouinard, 2016)<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n While I still believe that H5P is a tool that should be available for all staff at our institution, I do think it’s useful and necessary to examine its affordances. I shared my experience in the forums, and it was interesting to hear from others and their focus on good design. I should also note in this post I intend to focus on a variety of content types, of which there are many. <\/p>\n\n\n\nAffordances<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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