Norways biggest e-learning site asks their vendors to use H5P instead of Flash
www.ndla.no is Norway’s largest e-learning site for the secondary school level with 2,6 millions unique visitors in 2013. The website is publicly funded and has a large editorial staff for keeping the learning content up to date. NDLA requires most of its content to be openly licensed to encourage sharing and collaboration.
Since its startup in 2008, NDLA has used Flash to deliver rich and engaging interactive content to teachers and students. However, with the introduction of smartphones and tablets, the Flash content could not be universally viewed on all devices. In addition, Flash has always been a proprietary format, which did not suit the open source policy of the website.
With Flash going away NDLA had to choose between allowing their suppliers to deliver rich content as HTML5 websites, investing in a huge amount of custom authoring tools or cooperate with the H5P team in the development of H5P. NDLA chose the last option.
NDLA's philosophy of liberating and sharing e-learning content and technology came to life with the new H5P technology. NDLA is already seeing their investments in the technology helping other organisations to create richer content. And as more and more content types are developed for H5P the capabilities of NDLA's authoring tool become increasingly powerful.
Every time a supplier creates a new type of rich content and uploads it to NDLA the H5P authoring tool learns to create yet another content type and NDLA's editors are empowered to create yet another great type of content.
NDLA buys learning content, such as educational games, videos and animations, from suppliers in the market. Content suppliers can deliver any type of content to NDLA. If it is possible to create an experience with HTML5 it is possible to create it with H5P. H5P makes it easy to publish and manage the content both in a technological and editorial manner. The editors can easily correct e.g. typing errors or reuse content components for other purposes.
Customization of existing content types and development of new content types are in progress.
NDLA is using Drupal 6 as their publishing platform today. They will switch to a new platform sometime in the future. Independent of which platform they choose, both the rich content and the H5P technology for creating and maintaining the content, will be easy to plug in to any new type of publishing platform. This reduces the cost of training the editors in using the new platform and also dramatically reduces the cost of porting content and features to the new platform.
