Six months since the D2L acquisition

Submitted by falcon on Wed, 01/22/2025 - 12:09

The H5P Community and the H5P Software can’t be bought. However, D2L did buy H5P Group, the company behind H5P, six months ago. This initially caused some of us to worry. Honestly, I was a bit worried myself that some of the statements made prior to the acquisition were made to make me comfortable, and would quickly be forgotten.

Six months in and the statements still hold true.

  • D2L is minimizing disruptions.
  • The roadmap remains unchanged except for a small two-digit number of hours to improve the Brightspace integration.
  • D2L is working on open-source contributions to H5P, training a two-digit number of developers to become H5P developers, and is eager to keep things working just as well or better than before for other LMS users.
  • D2L has given H5P Group access to more resources like their user research and accessibility teams.
  • H5P Group has released a new development environment for new and existing developers (programmers) of content types and is now releasing some highly requested improvements for all H5P users.

      • Still early days, but I am more confident than ever that H5P will be moving forward faster and stronger in the months to come. The acquisition also means that H5P is being embraced by two of the top four educational LMS systems and we keep progressing towards becoming the standard for interactive content. We in the community should be extremely proud.

      H5P Group had started on several super exciting projects prior to the acquisition. Good progress is still being made, such as the new theme. I have seen the first content types dressed up in the new theme, with customizable colors and paddings and it looks awesome. Can’t wait to release it. The Layout Builder is also progressing nicely and will provide us with super accessible and responsive layouts for pages, Interactive Book, and probably other content types as well.

      We made a leapfrog towards our vision this summer and will keep pacing until most content in the world is powered by open source. We are not only open source, but super portable, and H5P content is not owned by big software platforms, but by the creators of the content themselves. Our content is powered by H5P open source software owned by all of us.

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