October 2016 status update

Submitted by falcon on Mon, 09/26/2016 - 21:47

Adoption of H5P is increasing at an incredible pace and community engagement is higher than ever. We are seeing great initiative taken by the community both in spreading the word and actively contributing in the development of H5P. This positive reaction has allowed the core team to almost double in size to match the aspirations of the community and bring H5P to the next level. 

Interactive Video is world-class and getting better

Interactive Video is just one of our 30 content types but competes with commercial services that only do interactive video. We compete handily with them even before price is taken into consideration. In many procurement processes by big organizations around the world H5P's Interactive Video ends up on top. It is always fun to answer them when they ask about prices and then about hidden costs. Since H5P is free and open source, there are no costs!

When creatives create interactive content it is theirs. It should never be locked in a proprietary system. 

We've been focusing on other content types for months now but in this release, the community has been hard at work making Interactive Video even better. Many new features that the H5P community has been waiting for have been added. It is now possible to create more customized experiences with several new ways for authors to design custom paths through the videos. It is also a lot easier to navigate the videos making it much more intuitive for both authors and learners. I hope the improvements will have a high impact for many in the community, and there is a lot more to come for Interactive Video in the next two releases.

Superstar community contributors

There is a steep increase in the many types of contributions from the community. Talented developers are contributing with pull requests and increasing numbers of progressive organizations are sponsoring Joubel and the core team  to develop improvements for H5P and share them with the community. Many of the great new features in this release were created by otacke, an excellent German developer who has just started to share his H5P work on GitHub and H5P.org - when he's not busy creating online courses for mooin in his actual job. Key features of Interactive video such as Jump backward, adjustable playthrough rate and more were developed by otacke. I think this is the release with the biggest number of non-Joubel contributions so far and we have a lot more coming up in the next release.

Hanging out on H5P.org with the rest of the community is super fun. I've had great talks with random community members on Appear.In, and it is extremely useful to discuss how H5P may be improved in the forum. I've also seen inspiring ways people are integrating and customizing H5P. See for instance this showcase post about how Nick and his team in Eurekos are easily inserting H5P content into page-layouts and courses. I hope stories like this might trigger you to do interesting things with your H5P site and share your own H5P stories in the forum.

Next release

Here are some of the new features we expect to see in the next release.

It is easier than ever to help out with upcoming releases. We're trying out Jira as an open platform for H5P so that everyone in the community can see what is being worked on and what is in the pipeline. Anyone can sign up, anyone can comment and everything is visible without a login

To contribute to the progress towards the next H5P release go to the new Jira page we're trying out. You'll be able to try out some of the upcoming improvements and discuss proposed and implemented solutions. You may also offer to take on some of the tasks yourself and suggest new tasks.

Please leave comments if you have opinions on tools we should be using instead of Jira. Important features in such a tool are (1) GitHub integration so that commits show up in related issues automatically and (2) a good board for agile development. We'll be using Jira for the next release and hope to learn from that.

The single most important thing for H5P's success

Adoption is the single most important thing that drives H5P forward. The number of people working on the project, amount of funding and amount of feedback to guide the project forward is determined by H5P’s adoption. And H5Ps adoption is determined by how active the community is. Currently, the community is crushing the marketing teams of any commercial product on the planet. Community members are presenting H5P everywhere, organizing webinars, talking about H5P in social media, telling their friends and colleagues about H5P and doing whatever else they can to make more people aware of the project. Please continue doing this. It is so important! It is so efficient!

Below is a couple of prewritten messages. I would love it if you could share something like this in social media:

The best tool for interactive content is open and free https://h5p.org

Spread on: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

Many amazing new Interactive Video features in the H5P October release https://h5p.org/oct-2016-interactive-video-improvements 

Spread on: Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook

We will keep improving, we'll keep growing. We'll make interactive content production many times more efficient in the future by making all interactive content and technologies reusable and interoperable.

 

Release note for the October 2016 release.