December 2016 Status Update

Submitted by falcon on Tue, 12/06/2016 - 09:58

It has only been a couple of weeks since the last release, and here we are again, pushing H5P forward faster and faster with a brand new release.

The support for H5P is tremendous. The H5P community spans from Australia to America and I can feel the energy of our worldwide movement eager for H5P to be a success.

With every improvement made to H5P, it becomes easier for people to abandon overpriced and bloated tools and freely create amazing interactive content that is theirs forever and shareable on any platform.

Improving the reporting

My philosophy has always been that H5P should be all about the content. This has allowed H5P to develop quickly and maintain a simple codebase.

However, it also means that it requires extra work and software to collect and present data from user interactions. H5P content types use the xAPI specification to communicate to the framework around H5P, Moodle for instance, everything the user is doing.

The idea is that third party software can use these data to create reports, do learning analytics, adaptivity and pretty much anything else as well. This philosophy has been quite successful so far. There are xAPI plugins/modules for H5P being worked on by non-core developers for all the platforms we support.

Not everyone in the community has the resources or skills required to set up their own Learning Record Store to collect data from H5P and display reports. Because of this, and thanks to generous funding from the Opigno team, we’re now able to give users this ability without requiring a Learning Record Store. The Drupal Quiz module (version 4) is the first to receive integrated H5P reporting that shows all the user’s answers and the correct answers. In future releases we’ll be adding the same on H5P.org and for the Moodle Gradebook.

I’m also happy to say that we have added a lot more xAPI data and statements so that we have a more complete xAPI coverage for our question types. This will allow us all to get more out of the reporting, no matter what kind of options we’re using.

Next release

The Core Team is always working on improving the UX and the accessibility of H5P. As mentioned in my previous update the schema based parts of the editor will receive a lot of attention in the next main release. More color, more space, better differentiation between important and less important items will make it a lot easier and more pleasant to use the authoring tool. Two people in the Core Team are working full time constantly on improving the UX of H5P and some of the other core developers are helping out as well. I hope we will see their progress clearly in the next releases.

What now?

The success of the H5P project relies on as many people using and sharing interactive content as possible. Help spread the word about H5P as an open and free alternative to expensive and outdated elearning tools!