Status Update

Submitted by falcon on Sun, 04/02/2017 - 15:06

Over the course of an afternoon a few years ago, I created the first version of H5P.org based on Drupal and a shared Drupal theme. It was hosted on a cheap cloud solution and was meant to be a community site with information about H5P and features for trying out H5P. It had Google Analytics installed and every time someone from outside our hometown of Tromsø visited the site, there were big cheers in the office. The jubilation went through the roof when a single person reached out to us with questions about the project. Getting the first support request was a blast.

The original goal; empowering everyone to create, share and reuse interactive content, hasn’t changed, and we’re taking steps towards making it a reality every day. The release we’re doing now is an important milestone on the way towards this vision. The entire release consists of work created by people in the community who aren’t yet part of the core team. An active, skilled and dedicated community is fundamental if we are to reach our goals and the current release proves that the H5P Community is getting stronger and stronger every day.

Today there is always someone on H5P.org. Usually a three-digit number of simultaneous users. We’ve had to do optimizations to keep the site stable and responsive. We’ve got a huge list of high profile organizations using H5P. The core team spends around 14 hours per day answering requests from the community. We are definitively moving forward. 

When I’m traveling around presenting H5P people seem to perceive the project as a success, and I guess it might be in many ways. But to me we’re making good progress but there are still a lot of work to be done.

Our vision is to empower everyone to create, share and reuse interactive content. There are still a lot of people who don’t know about H5P or aren’t using it yet. And there are all those little things that are not quite there, that the community constantly reports and fixes. Also, there are no good way for an H5P user to tell everyone else - “I’ve created this great H5P content about Pythagoras, feel free to repurpose and reuse it!”. Efficient sharing won’t be possible until the complete H5P Hub launches later this year. With the H5P Hub in place, we hope to see H5P take reuse of interactive content to unprecedented levels achieving economies of scale that every user of interactive content will notice. H5P will take us a huge step forward in the quantities and qualities of interactive content available on the web.

We’re working hard to push H5P forward, and it is amazing to see good results along the way. Every day we get messages from people super excited about H5P, like this one received today:

I have an account through my school and create tons of interactive math content for high school kids. 

I love it SO much that I just created this personal account to start creating content for my 4 year old. I am using it to help her with basic math (she loves typing in the answers), click the word for word recognition, drag and drop with images and words...

I LOVE this site so much! Thank you so much for creating this. And it is super easy to create and modify anything I want. :)

Every day we help people create great interactive content. We will keep this up, we will keep going faster and faster and we will completely change how people think about Interactive Content.

Originally the H5P Core Team planned to launch the first version of the H5P Content Type Hub in this release, but it has taken more time than planned to implement. It will be ready in April. Luckily, thanks to the awesome H5P Community we could still do a complete release with awesome features without a single line of code from the core team. Keep up the good work everyone!

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