February 2019 Status Update

Submitted by falcon on Wed, 02/27/2019 - 12:40

This past December in Melbourne, 200 of us got to enjoy three days of sharing H5P related experiences, meeting enthusiastic community members and discussing the future of H5P. It was the first conference with call for papers and I very much enjoyed participating in some of the high quality sessions delivered by community members.

Victoria University set the bar high by doing an excellent job as hosts of the conference. Victoria University also sponsored and introduced Branching Scenario on day one of the conference. Branching Scenario has been in the works for a couple of years and takes H5P big steps forward in several areas. It quickly became the talk of the conference.

The Branching Scenario authoring tool is the first to introduce a couple of brand new authoring features. You may preview Branching Scenarios without saving and also edit the content in full screen mode. The full-screen editing is sponsored by Mozilla and we’re working on bringing it to more content types.

NDLA, the sponsors of Virtual Tour (360) was also present introducing a very early version of the new content type. Virtual Reality and 360 is the hype of the industry and H5P will of course participate in taking these technologies from niche to something everyone can and want to use. Virtual Tour is also versatile, supporting normal flat images as well as 360. It may be expanded in the future to support hidden hotspots allowing authors to create game-like experiences both in 2D and 3D, in addition to the more classic use-cases.

When we were in Melbourne this past December we did not expect Branching Scenario and Virtual Tour to be released simultaneously, but we’ve spent a lot more time getting Branching Scenario and the example content in place.

The highlights of the Melbourne conference were the introduction of the new content types. In addition to Virtual Tour and Branching Scenario we also introduced Interactive Book, Dictation and Mini-Course. Oliver Tacke had Dictation ready for the conference and it was released later in December. Interactive Book was also scheduled to be released, but user-testing indicated that there are a few major things we still need to improve. However, a  secret alpha version is available for those eager to start experimenting with interactive books. Mini-Course is still in its earlier stages. Fnoks is developing this in his own time, and I hope we’ll see it closer to release soon.

The February 2019 release is our biggest release ever. I want to thank Victoria University, NDLA and Mozilla for sponsoring and working with the Core Team on the new content types and sharing it with the rest of the H5P Community.

Looking ahead we’re now working on Moodle Mobile support and improvements for multilingual content and I’m looking forward to getting these features released.

I hope the community will be as eager as ever spreading the word about H5P. With Branching Scenario and Virtual Tour in place, the list of reasons for creating content with tools that use lock-in strategies to hold on to customers keeps getting shorter. We will continue to make more and more interactive content flow freely.

Keep up the good work everyone!

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