China

Submitted by VitalEnglishCanada on Mon, 09/11/2017 - 21:17
VitalEnglishCanada's picture
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General discussion

Has anyone used H5P in China? I.e. are there any firewall issues I should be aware of?

Thomas

Summary: 
China
serettig's picture

serettig

Tue, 09/12/2017 - 19:03

I have not used it from China, but if you don't rely on h5p.org for embedded content, you can put all h5p related files onto a Chinese server and then there should be no necessity to communicate with "foreign" servers at all. Of course, there might be issues if content doesn't pass cencorship, but the firewall blocking Western servers won't be the reason for it.

akud's picture

akud

Thu, 09/28/2017 - 22:43

In October, my colleague will go to China to train teachers of Italian as Second Language. In his workshops, he'll be using H5P interactive contents. While preparing to this, he asked me how about rendering these materials in the Chinese web. Since I'm not 100% sure, I have to say I don't know. Now that I've read serettig comment, the problem looks more serious than I thought - and not only about Google and YouTube (videos)...

At worst, I thought of a local installation (e.g. XAMPP + Wordpress + H5P) on his computer. But will the H5P Hub still work? Do I need and/or is enough to uncheck it from admin (dashboard) > settings > H5P? But most of all, does this make any sense?

Any idea? A little help?

serettig's picture

serettig

Fri, 09/29/2017 - 07:31

You're right, it's not entirely certain if h5p.org can be fully accessed from China. My guess would be that it'll work, but of course there's no guarantee for it. The same is true for the H5P Hub. But even if it shouldn't work, you can still run all already transfered content types on the local server and also create new content with them without accessing h5p.org at all.

Does the institution your colleagues will work at have a learning management system like moodle? Then it might be possible to put the content on there to be sure it'll work. Or you could host your own private server in the West and put the H5P content on there. Hosting is not very expensive, especially if you only want a contract for a year or so. It's very unlikely that an obscure private server will be blocked.

The 'Speak the words' content type relies on Google's services, so here the probability that it won't work are high. 

BV52's picture

BV52

Fri, 09/29/2017 - 10:34

Hi,

I was able to confirm from a relative that H5P.org can be accessed in China. Although she mentioned that there has always been inconsistencies in accessing websites from outside the country.

-BV52

akud's picture

akud

Fri, 09/29/2017 - 11:02

I have to check a few things, mainly Moodle (I don't know how they are equipped) and our website (which is on US server).

We have a shared hosting, not a private server, but a cheap temporary private server solution could be an idea.

VitalEnglishCanada's picture

VitalEnglishCanada

Sun, 10/01/2017 - 18:28

Many thanks for all the feedback.

A buddy of mine is travelling in China at the moment and I had him test H5P for me. Everything works perfectly fine! He first tried through his VPN and then direct, and both worked without problems. 

So all good in China :-)