H5P, MERLOT and SkillsCommons working together

Major players leapfrogging towards the full promise of open education

Long Beach, California and Tromsø, Norway March 3rd 2022 - What might three of the largest open education communities in the world achieve together? Their communities include millions of educators, hundreds of thousands of educational institutions, one of the world’s biggest and most famous open educational resource repositories and by far the most widely adopted authoring tool for open content. Brought together in the right way, these partners have the potential to change the entire world of open education.

The world of open education has slowly been making progress towards the promise of much better content at no cost, but is still too fragmented to deliver on this promise in a big way. H5P, MERLOT and SkillsCommons will change this.

Their shared mission is: To improve the efficacy of teaching and learning by expanding the quantity and increasing the quality of online learning materials and services that can be easily incorporated into educational programs.

“We have been keeping an eye on H5P for some time, and see a great potential in H5P solving some of the fundamental challenges of the world of open education. H5P content is always unified and always editable, and still open and flexible. H5P can be instrumental in helping the open education community overcome many challenges of remixing and revising OER to address the diverse needs of learners. It might just be the format we have been pursuing for open educational resources. Initially, we will be leveraging H5P on some of the resources in our repositories and gathering feedback from our communities. The aim is to scale this up and leverage H5P on as many of our resources as possible.” - Gerry Hanley, Executive Director, MERLOT & SkillsCommons

“MERLOT and SkillsCommons are among the most successful and inspired in doing what we have been dreaming about doing since we started the H5P project. Their vibrant communities and massive collection of open content has saved so much work and helped learning and teaching for so many. We are very excited to be collaborating and hope that together, we will be able to inspire even more educators to share their work and make it easier to benefit more from what has already been shared.” - Svein-Tore Griff With, Founder and CEO, H5P

MERLOT—The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching

MERLOT (www.merlot.org) is an international cooperative formed for the purpose of aggregating and making freely accessible, high quality online resources to improve learning and teaching within higher education. Led the by California State University Long Beach, the cooperative connects systems, consortiums, and institutions of higher education, professional organizations of academic disciplines, and individual members to form a community of people who strive to enrich the teaching and learning experience. SkillsCommons (www.skillscommons.org) is an OER repository managed by the CSULB-MERLOT team and focuses on serving the workforce development needs of various stakeholder groups across industry sectors.

H5P

H5P is a young, fast-growing open source software community improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world by empowering educators to create, share and reuse better open e-learning content faster.

H5P is a framework made to allow everyone to create, share and reuse interactive HTML5 content and is easily integrated in different sites. H5P offers templates allowing users to create rich and engaging content without any design or programming skills. Currently over 50 templates are offered including Interactive Video, Virtual 360 Tours and Branching Scenario.

Learn more about MERLOT, SkillsCommons and H5P