Best practices for connecting H5P responses with LMS's user data?

I’m a brand-new convert to H5P and no doubt am trying to crawl before I can walk — don’t we all know that feeling, when exploring a tool as rich, as promising, and as well-supported as this one? I’m hoping I’m at least at the point of being able to ask a meaningful kind of question here, even if I don’t know enough to ask it efficiently. :-)

This is a new level of learning for me — ’til encountering H5P, I’d expected that in building courses for an LMS I’d pretty much be limited to using features provided by the LMS itself, like its gradebooks, text-based quizzes, and forum topic posts. This is an exciting world, particularly for the ways that H5P’s been liberating it from the spendy lock-in of commercial SCORM/xAPI authoring tools that’ve looked much the same for a decade or more. H5P’s a real breath of fresh air — HTML5-based (bye bye Flash), responsive (hello phone screens), openly shared, author-able in a simple browser, and chock-full of interactions that tilt toward learners’ knowledge development rather than assessment for the sake of compliance. H5P looks like a really crucial tool for building out learning interactions in MOOC-style LMS interfaces, so that these can be used for knowledge-building in innovative and even revolutionary ways.

In line with all that blue-skying, I’m looking for advice on how to capture the richest output possible from H5P interactions to an LMS. From useful resources like these that BV52 recommends -- https://h5p.org/documentation/for-authors/analyzing-results-and-answers and https://h5p.org/documentation/x-api -- I’m gathering that only quite-basic information is being shared from H5P directly to an LMS, but that much more can be captured out of H5P’s xAPI output, so long as that’s somehow connected to a Learning Resource Store such as scormcloud, learninglocker, grassblade, or watershed. Is that the case?

At this point, I’m working with interactions via the plugins for WordPress and Moodle. In WordPress, I’m seeing the basic output of the H5P plugin’s own “My Results” window, and with somewhat more detail using Oliver Tacke's free plugin H5PxAPIkatchu — available from the WordPress Plugins store and described by Oliver T in this 4-minute youtube video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAcJtKS0NiA.

For the interactions I’ve been working with — mainly Interactive Video so far — the H5P-Content plugin’s “My Results” window shows 6 columns, for Content, Score, Maximum Score, Opened, Finished, and Time Spent. With H5PxAPIkatchu the information output is quite a bit richer, with a total 17 columns, labeled Actor ID, Actor Name, Actor Group Members, Verb ID, Verb Display, Object ID, Object Def. Name, Object Def. Choices, Object Def. Correct Responses, Result Response, Result Score Raw, Result Score Scaled, Result Completion, Result Success, Result Duration, Time, and xAPI. This output can be copied and pasted into a spreadsheet program like Excel for a little flexibility in display, charting, etc., but isn’t directly integrate-able with WordPress user tables or the user tables of LMS plugins for WordPress such as lifterlms, wplms, lucidlms, etc.

Am I correct, then, in understanding that if I do want local-server access to the kind of xAPI output that H5PxAPIkatchu displays, that’s: a) Not available at this time using the H5P plugin for Moodle LMS? And b) Only integrate-able with other learner records using xAPI in combination with an external Learning Record Store such as scormcloud’s, etc.? Would it, then, be necessary to make use of an LRS, in order to view charting and other configurable displays for xAPI-delivered data in an LMS like Moodle or one of the WordPress LMS plugins? What have H5P community members here found to work especially well, or not to work as well as hoped?

Also, I’m very interested in hearing about H5P users’ experience with how well xAPI data can be made to “play together” with data from LMS’s own assessment types. That is, when using an LRS are you limited to viewing only xAPI results with its displays, or is it somehow possible to combine this output with user-provided data from an LMS’s own assessment types like Moodle’s Quiz, Assessment, Choice, Questionnaire, etc.? Does Moodle’s gradebook, for instance, somehow share any own data to any of the LRS’s, so that display integration might take place there? I’ve seen a couple articles like this one from last spring -- http://ethinkeducation.com/measure-moodle-data-xapi-lrs/ -- that describe Moodle plugins for xAPI with names like xAPI Launch Link and xAPI Logstore. Might anyone here have experiences with that sort of thing? Again, I’m platform-agnostic as to implementing comprehensive MOOC-style e-learning by using Moodle or any of the WordPress LMS’s, and I'm very interested in learning whatever anyone else has got to share in this wonderfully active H5P developer/user community.

Finally, I understand that H5P.com will be rolling out quite soon, through the smoothie-powered efforts of core developers like Joubel. Am I justified in hoping that this exciting new service will tackle these complex kinds of data-integration issues in ways that “just work”?

Thanks for reading what’s turned out to be quite a long post! I hope I haven’t posed this set of newbie questions in too confusing a way :-). I’ve looked enough at the h5p.org forums in recent days to recognize what a wealth of expertise we have here, so I’m looking forward to a firehose of great responses.

Cheers,

Jim

BV52's picture

Hi Jim,

Here's an article on the subject that is worth a read.

Also on WordPress, H5P uses the user_email field of the wp_users table for actor/mbox within the statement, so it should not be a problem to link that to other plugins. Otacke also mentioned that a future version of H5PxAPIkatchu will also include the user_id in the table.

-BV52

Thank you....your linked vid for H5PxAPIkatchu was a big help